In 2012, Sue Natali arrived in Duvanny Yar, Siberia, for the first time. Then a postdoctoral research fellow studying the effects of thawing permafrost due to climate change, she had seen photos of this site many times. Rapid thawing at Duvanny Yar had caused a massive ground collapse – a “mega slump” – like a giant sinkhole in the middle of the Siberian tundra. But nothing had prepared her for seeing it in person.

“It was incredible, really incredible”, she recalls while speaking to me from The Woods Hole Research Center, Massachusetts, where she is an associate scientist. “I still get chills when I think about it… I just couldn’t believe the magnitude: collapsing cliffs the size of multi-storey buildings … and as you walk along you see what look like logs poking out the permafrost. But they aren’t logs, they are the bones of mammoths and other Pleistocene animals.”

What Natali describes is the visible, dramatic effects of a rapidly warming Arctic. The permafrost – up until now, permanently frozen land and soil – is thawing out, and revealing its hidden secrets. Alongside Pleistocene fossils are massive carbon and methane emissions, toxic mercury, and ancient diseases.

The organic-rich permafrost holds an estimated 1,500 billion tonnes of carbon. “That’s about twice as much carbon in the atmosphere, and three times as much carbon than that stored in all the world’s forests”, says Natali. She explains that between 30% and 70% of the permafrost may melt before 2100, depending on how effectively we respond to climate change. “The 70% is business as usual, if we continue to burn fossil fuels at our current rate, and 30% is if we vastly reduce our fossil fuel emissions… Of the 30-70% that thaws, the carbon locked up in organic matter will begin to be broken down by microbes, they use it as fuel or energy, and they release it as CO2 or methane.”

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Around 10% of the carbon that does defrost will probably be released as CO2, amounting to 130-150 billion tonnes. That is equivalent to the current rate of total US emissions, every year until 2100. Melting permafrost effectively introduces a new country at number two on the highest emitters list, and one that isn’t accounted for in current IPCC models. “People talk about a carbon bomb,” says Natali. “In geological timescales this is not a slow release. It is a pool of carbon that is locked away and is not accounted for in the carbon budget to keep rises below two degrees (Celsius).”

The Northern Hemisphere winter of 2018/2019 was dominated by headlines of the “polar vortex”, as temperatures plummeted unusually far south into North America. In South Bend, Indiana, it reached -29C in January 2019, almost twice as low as the city’s previous record set in 1936. What such stories masked, however, was that the opposite was happening in the far North, beyond the Arctic circle. January 2019 also saw Arctic sea ice average just 13.56 million square kilometres (5.24 million square miles), some 860,000 square kilometres (332,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 long-term average, and only slightly above the record low reached in January 2018.

In November, when temperatures should have been -25C, a temperature of 1.2C above freezing was recorded at the North Pole. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world (in part due to the loss of solar reflectivity).

“We are seeing a big increase in the thaw of permafrost”, confirms Emily Osborne, program manager for the Arctic Research Program, NOAA, and editor of the Arctic Report Card, an annual peer-reviewed environmental study of the Arctic. As a direct result of rising air temperatures, she says, the permafrost is thawing and “the landscape is physically crumbling as a result… things are changing so fast, and in ways that researchers hadn’t even anticipated.”

The headline of the 2017 Arctic Report Card pulled no punches: “Arctic shows no sign of returning to a reliably frozen region”. One paper co-authored by Hanne Christiansen, professor and vice dean of education at University Centre Svalbard, Norway, studied permafrost temperatures at a depth of 20 metres (that's 65ft, far enough down not to be affected by short-term seasonal changes) and found temperatures had risen by up to 0.7C since 2000. Christiansen, who is also president of the International Permafrost Association, tells me, “temperatures are increasing inside the permafrost at relatively high speed… then, of course, what was permanently frozen before can become released.” In 2016, the autumn temperatures in Svalbard remained above zero throughout November, “the first time this has happened in the records that we have, going back to 1898”, says Christiansen. “Then large amounts of rain came – the precipitation here is typically snow… we had mudslides crossing roads for 100s of metres… we had to evacuate some parts of the population.”

The rapid change in North American permafrost is equally alarming. “In some places in the Alaskan Arctic, you fly over a swiss cheese of land and lakes formed by ground collapse,” says Natali, whose fieldwork has moved from Siberia to Alaska. “Water that was close to the surface now becomes a pond.” Many of these ponds are bubbling with methane, as microbes suddenly find themselves with a feast of ancient organic matter to munch on, releasing methane as a by-product. “We often walk across the lakes because it’s so shallow and it’s like you’re in a hot tub in some places, there is so much bubbling,” says Natali.

But methane and CO2 are not the only things being released from the once frozen ground. In the summer of 2016, a group of nomadic reindeer herders began falling sick from a mysterious illness. Rumours began circling of the “Siberian plague”, last seen in the region in 1941. When a young boy and 2,500 reindeer died, the disease was identified: anthrax. Its origin was a defrosting reindeer carcass, a victim of an anthrax outbreak 75 years previously. The 2018 Arctic report card speculates that, “diseases like the Spanish flu, smallpox or the plague that have been wiped out might be frozen in the permafrost.” A French study in 2014 took a 30,000 year-old virus frozen within permafrost, and warmed it back up in the lab. It promptly came back to life, 300 centuries later. (To read more, see BBC Earth’s piece on the diseases hidden in ice.)

Adding to this apocalyptic vision, in 2016 the Doomsday Vault – a sub-permafrost facility in Arctic Norway, which safeguards millions of crop seeds for perpetuity – was breached with meltwater. And listed amongst the membership of The Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost, is Swedish Nuclear Waste Management who presumably also rely on a permanently frozen permafrost (when BBC Future approached them for comment on this point, they did not respond).

Long-preserved human archaeology may also be emerging, but just as quickly lost. A frozen Palaeo-Eskimo site in Greenland, preserved for some 4,000 years, is at risk of being washed away. This is just one of an estimated 180,000 archaeological sites preserved in the permafrost, often with soft tissues and clothing that uniquely remain intact but would rot quickly if exposed. Adam Markham, of the Union of Concerned Scientists has said, “with rapid, human-caused climate change, many sites or the artefacts they contain, will be lost before they have been discovered.”

More modern (and unwanted) human detritus will, however, not rot away: marine microplastics. Due to circular global marine currents, much plastic waste ends up in the Arctic, where it becomes frozen in sea ice or permafrost. A recent study of marine micro-particles demonstrated that concentrations were higher in the Arctic Basin than all other ocean basins in the world. Microplastic concentrations in the Greenland Sea doubled between 2004 and 2015. “Scientists are finding that those microplastics are accumulating across the entire ocean and being dumped into the Arctic”, explains Osborne. “This is something we didn’t [previously] realise was a problem. What scientists are trying to find out now is the composition of these microplastics, what sort of fish are feeding on these… and whether we are essentially eating microplastics through eating these fish.”

Read more:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190612-the-poisons-released-by-melting-arctic-ice

Time to stop our emissions of CO2. Full stop. As mentioned on this site by Gus, we should have stopped these emissions in 1996, to arrest the rise of temperature at about 2 degrees above average and manage "global warming". Our next concern now is to limit the damage at less than 6 degrees above average as it could go up to 9 then 12 degrees above average, sooner than the next Trump tweet...

Scientists shocked by Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years sooner than predicted

Ice blocks frozen solid for thousands of years destabilized

‘The climate is now warmer than at any time in last 5,000 years’

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.“

With governments meeting in Bonn this week to try to ratchet up ambitions in United Nations climate negotiations, the team’s findings, published on 10 June in Geophysical Research Letters, offered a further sign of a growing climate emergency.

The paper was based on data Romanovsky and his colleagues had been analysing since their last expedition to the area in 2016. The team used a modified propeller plane to visit exceptionally remote sites, including an abandoned cold war-era radar base more than 300km from the nearest human settlement.

Diving through a lucky break in the clouds, Romanovsky and his colleagues said they were confronted with a landscape that was unrecognisable from the pristine Arctic terrain they had encountered during initial visits a decade or so earlier.

The vista had dissolved into an undulating sea of hummocks – waist-high depressions and ponds known as thermokarst. Vegetation, once sparse, had begun to flourish in the shelter provided from the constant wind.

Torn between professional excitement and foreboding, Romanovsky said the scene had reminded him of the aftermath of a bombardment.

“It’s a canary in the coalmine,” said Louise Farquharson, a postdoctoral researcher and co-author of the study. “It’s very likely that this phenomenon is affecting a much more extensive region and that’s what we’re going to look at next.“

Scientists are concerned about the stability of permafrost because of the risk that rapid thawing could release vast quantities of heat-trapping gases, unleashing a feedback loop that would in turn fuel even faster temperature rises.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/18/arctic-permafrost-ca...

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This week, researchers published the first results from Boaty’s first expedition to the murky depths of the Southern Ocean where it travelled some 180 kilometers (111 miles) at a depth of 4,000 meters in 2017.

The plucky craft identified a previously unknown but frightening phenomenon whereby the increasingly intense winds blowing over the Southern Ocean exacerbate turbulence in the ice-cold waters below, churning up cold water from the ocean floor and warming it up with hotter currents closer to the surface.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/462201-boaty-mcboatface-first-results/

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Images from Cold War spy satellites have revealed the dramatic extent of ice loss in the Himalayan glaciers.

Scientists compared photographs taken by a US reconnaissance programme with recent spacecraft observations and found that melting in the region has doubled over the last 40 years.

The study shows that since 2000, glaciers heights have been shrinking by an average of 0.5m per year.

The researchers say that climate change is the main cause.

"From this study, we really see the clearest picture yet of how Himalayan glaciers have changed," Joshua Maurer, from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, told BBC News. 

The research is published in the journal Science Advances.

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During the 1970s and 1980s, a US spy programme - codenamed Hexagon - launched 20 satellites into orbit to secretly photograph the Earth.

The covert images were taken on rolls of film that were then dropped by the satellites into the atmosphere to be collected mid-air by passing military planes.

The material was declassified in 2011, and has been digitised by the US Geological Survey for scientists to use.

Among the spy photos are the Himalayas - an area for which historical data is scarce. 

By comparing these pictures with more recent satellite data from Nasa and the Japanese space agency (Jaxa), the researchers have been able to see how the region has changed.

The Columbia University team looked at 650 glaciers in the Himalayas spanning 2,000km.

The group found that between 1975 and 2000, an average of 4bn tonnes of ice was being lost each year.

But between 2000 and 2016, the glaciers melted approximately twice as fast - losing about 8bn tonnes of ice each year on average.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48696023

And of course, the equivalent in Olympic swimming pools: 

Mr Maurer said: "For a sense of scale, 8bn tonnes of ice is enough to fill 3.2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools per year."

Wow! So we need to make the equivalent with Sydney Harbour size, for more bogan yobo from the shire lingo precision: Olympic-size swimming pool contains 2.5 ML or 2,500,000 litres of water. (forget the swimming pools, 8 bn tonnes of ice = 8,000,000,000,000 litres of water = 8 GL) - Sydney Harbour holds about 500 GL (or 500,000,000,000,000 litres). Do your own calculations. My dicky solar calculator, once you remove all the useless zeros, tells me with some uncertainty that this could be 0.016 Sydney Harbour per year... or less than a small 3mm downpour on a single rainy day in Sydney... It could be wrong... Not much considering the price of fish... but adding year after year after year, should you be living downstream from the melts, your kitchen will be flooded.

The massive heat dome that shattered all-time temperature records across much of Europe last week has settled in over Greenland, driving temperatures across the vast region to as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. In July, Greenland’s ice sheet lost 197 billion tons of ice, the equivalent of around 80 million Olympic swimming pools. This comes as the World Meteorological Organization said Thursday that July was the warmest month in recorded human history. It followed the hottest June on record, as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels climbed to a record high of 415 parts per million earlier this year. We speak with Jason Box, professor and ice climatologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. We’re going to turn right now to the issue of Greenland. The World Meteorological Organization said Thursday that July was the warmest month in recorded human history. It followed the hottest June on record, as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels climbed to a record high of 415 parts per million earlier this year. The massive heat dome that shattered all-time temperature records across much of Europe last week has settled in over Greenland, driving temperatures across the vast region to as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. In July, Greenland’s ice sheet lost 197 billion tons of ice, the equivalent of around 80 million Olympic swimming pools.

Writing in Rolling Stone in an article titled “Greenland Is Melting Away Before Our Eyes,” the meteorologist Eric Holthaus warns Greenland’s ice was expected to melt at its fastest-ever rate ever recorded, on Thursday, when, quote, “more than 12 billion tons of water will permanently melt away from the ice sheet and find its way down to the ocean, irreversibly raising sea levels globally.”

For more, we’re going to Copenhagen, Denmark, where we’re joined by Jason Box, professor and ice climatologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

Jason Box, welcome to Democracy Now! In these last minutes we have together, can you just lay out what is happening in Greenland, what it has to do with the climate crisis and the heat wave that we’ve been experiencing around the world?

JASON BOX: You mentioned this heat dome, this hot air that is parked over Greenland. That same air mass started in the Sahara. Warm air drifted on to Europe. It set records there across Europe, as I’m sure you’ve heard about. That warm air mass then drifted north, setting records across Scandinavia. It then, in a bizarre kind of circulation, drifted to the west. Normally the flow is the opposite direction. So this warm blob of air drifts over the ice sheet. And actually, Greenland was already well above average temperatures. Melt onset started three to five weeks ahead of normal, in early May. We saw this big melt year coming, and then this recent drift of warm air over the ice sheet is just a conspicuous example of how ice and climate change in the Arctic has been steadily warming.

We see an acceleration of loss from Arctic Canada, from Alaska, from Greenland — the ice. It has a lot of downstream effects. It’s flooding the North Atlantic with freshwater, disrupting ocean circulation in ways we don’t fully appreciate, probably increasing storm activity for northwestern Europe. And it’s part of our climate system, which is kind of getting unhinged as carbon continues to accumulate in the atmosphere. The ocean effect is a delayed response to the enhanced greenhouse effect. And we’re really just starting to see, as the climate system punches out of the noise of the last century, a very clear, steep-rising temperature in the Arctic, that’s actually affecting weather patterns around the hemisphere.

AMY GOODMAN: What is happening right now, the extreme temperatures that are engulfing Greenland, what will this mean for the rest of the planet? And can you talk about the issue of climate refugees, the symptoms of the climate crisis, from food shortages to thousands and thousands of people fleeing from regions affected by drought and water shortage, such as, well, throughout the world?

JASON BOX: The key factor for Greenland’s and other land ice loss is sea level rise. Now, that will take decades to really be felt in earnest. Between now and when we really have large sea level rise, it’s during high tide, storm surge, thermal expansion —events like Superstorm Sandy, that flooded the New York subway, that you get when you combine sea level rise with thermal expansion and high tide and storm surge.

But more immediate — and I’m glad that you mentioned that — is that, actually, the continents are heating up about twice as fast as the global temperature, just like the Arctic is heating twice as fast as the global temperature. The continents are drying. This is undermining food security. We are seeing more drought. And that will be a more immediate consequence of enhanced greenhouse effect. The migration of people that lose their food and water security, and that effect being disruptive for political systems, as these people seek a better livelihood, reluctantly leaving their homes and going elsewhere, I’m convinced that that will be a more immediate consequence of elevated greenhouse effect.

Sea level rise is an urgent, huge issue, which ultimately will force really uncountable people, numbers of people, to forfeit their land in coastal areas that we cannot justify or afford to build sea defenses. And those displaced people will add on top of food refugees and drought refugees, which we’re already seeing today.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us. I’m Amy Goodman. Jason Box is our guest, professor and ice climatologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. We’ll do Part 2 and post it online. Thanks so much.

Read more:

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/8/2/greenland_melting_climate_crisis_j...

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