Permafrost Melting 70 Years Early
Pictured here is a cemetery in northwestern Canada whose grave markers were anchored in ice thought at the time to be permanent, now melting rapidly.
From The Guardian:
Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared. A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia. “What we saw was amazing,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters. “It’s an indication that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more years.“
The issue at stake here is that rapid thawing will release vast quantities of methane, which will create a feedback loop producing an even faster rise in global temperatures. Moreover, scientists are concerned that pathogenic bacteria, the likes of which humankind has never seen, will be unleashed on a population with no immunity.
