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A crater formed in Siberia's permafrost is growing
- nsajko 10y agoRelated images and discussion here: http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/n0678-200000-year-old-soil-found-at-mysterious-crater-a-gate-to-the-subterranean-world/ http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/n0678-200000... http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/n0127-dozens-of-mysterious-new-craters-suspected-in-northern-russia/ http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/n0127-dozens... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9120690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9120690
- M_Grey 10y agoThat title is a bit sensational... there's nothing alarming about this. From the article: The trigger that led to the crater started in the 1960s. Rapid deforestation meant that the ground was no longer shaded by trees in the warmer summer months. This incoming sunlight then slowly warmed the ground. This was made worse by the loss of cold "sweat" from trees as they transpire, which would have kept the ground cool. "This combination of less shading and less vapid transpiration led to warming of the ground surface," says Julian Murton of the University of Sussex in the UK. This isn't related to climate change, and in fact may give us some data that helps to refine climate models. It's unfortunate, but at least (given the trend these days) it's not systemic.
- Ygg2 10y agoAlarming point was, permafrost has as much of carbon as our atmosphere. Once they thaw, the temperature skyrockets. I think at this point, we might need to detonate some hydrogen bombs, just to even out the temperature.
- mirimir 10y agoIt's not nuclear explosions that cause cooling. It's the firestorms that they cause. So that would be a painful strategy. However, I suppose that it's possible to build devices that created SOX. The hard part would be minimizing the radionuclides.
- Cieplak 10y ago> The hard part would be minimizing the radionuclides. Not necessarily. Tsar Bomba, the highest yield device ever detonated, was also among the cleanest because they tampered the third stage with lead instead of U-238.
- M_Grey 10y agoIt was cleaner than their original design, but still a wildly dirty, and stupidly inefficient device.
- dsfyu404ed 10y ago> stupidly inefficient device. Any idiot can say that in 2017. In 1967 you'd have to special kind of idiot to discount it as ineffective.
- M_Grey 10y agoNo, idiots are still impressed by big explosions. There's a reason it was scaled down from 100 MT, and even then it was known to be a waste, it used no new tech, was not practically deliverable, and oh yes... much of the blast energy just shot up and out into the stratosphere. How useful. It was designed to be a political statement as part of Cold War politics, and it was known by even its designers then that it was a silly fucking thing to be doing. To be honest, most nuclear testing by that point fell into the, "Silly fucking thing to be doing category..." but idiots still haven't figured that out.
- mirimir 10y agoIf they'd had a Pacific test site, they might well have gone with 100 MT.
- M_Grey 10y agoI suspect that you're right, although I hope that sanity might have prevailed. It's hard to imagine the damage the uranium liner + 50 megatons would have done to that ecosystem. Of course if the US hadn't been experiencing so much political upheaval, they might have tried responding in kind.
- richchurcher 10y ago> As more permafrost thaws, more and more carbon is exposed to microbes. The microbes consume the carbon, producing methane and carbon dioxide as waste products. These greenhouse gases are then released into the atmosphere, accelerating warming further. Yeah, the amount of sequestered carbon that could be released is concerning.
- pvaldes 10y agoConifers returning to the area could be our allies in this
- JBiserkov 10y agoAlso, the permafrost contains lots of methane which is a much more effective (bad) greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Global_warming_potential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Global_warming_...
- M_Grey 10y agoFlailing attempts at geoengineering will come later, after it becomes clear to even the thickest person that we're desperately screwed.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- beedogs 10y agoAnd, shortly thereafter, mass extinction of the human race and most other multicellular life.
- M_Grey 10y agoProbably, yes. It's looking more and more like 'The Great Filter' hypothesis is valid, and the filter is in our relatively near future. That said, I'm sure tardigrades, bacteria, plenty of fungi and the like won't even notice.
- adrianN 10y agoThe planet has been warmer in the past and supported multicellular life.
- senorjazz 10y agoThat isn't quite the same as the human race with it's current standard of living is it. "don't worry everyone, there will still be slime in the seas"
- hueving 10y agoWill they? It seems it would just trigger migrations inland away from rising sea levels. The significant improvements in agricultural technology over the last 100 years likely means it wouldn't significantly impact the ability to grow food in countries rich enough to have the ability to geoengineer in this manner, so it might not happen.
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- pavel_lishin 10y agoWouldn't it make more sense to launch solar shields into orbit?
- flukus 10y agoYes, but that's beyond our capabilities, nukes aren't.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoWe've got launch capability, and we've launched solar sails before.
- flukus 10y agoNow we've got to launch either a really massive solar sail or a lot of small ones. And they've got to be really massive or have enough fuel to maintain position.
- Retric 10y agoYou could setup the shield around Lagrange point 1 which has the advantage of not creating noticeable rings around the earth. This does not reduce material needed by all that much, but it does prevent kessler syndrome as your sunshade breaks down. However, a much cheaper option is simply cover large regions of the earth with a reflective coating. Between those extremes are things like hot air balloons in the upper atmosphere.
- M_Grey 10y agoOr you know, polluting with vast quantities of SOX. You're dreaming too big, and not dirty or dumb enough.
- macintux 10y agoI can't begin to imagine the difference in scale here. Perhaps a solar sail a few million times larger than all the solar sails we've ever launched, combined?
- jackmott 10y ago> This isn't related to climate change sure it is, read the whole article.
- jessaustin 10y agoTFA: We found several layers of buried soils. Two of them look especially promising. They show that thousands of years ago the climate in the region of Verkhoyansk was the same as it is now, and even warmer.
- Dangeranger 10y agoThe amount of potential methane locked away in the Siberian and Canadian permafrost is frightening. However the amount of potential methane locked into the continental shelf seabed is down right terrifying. If these two sources of greenhouse gases begin to form a positive feedback loop humanity is going to feel a world of hurt. It would lead us down a climate change road which we cannot recover from.
- rhardih 10y agoHypothetically we're completely screwed already and nothing we do at this point matters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
- brianbreslin 10y agoI wonder if it would be possible to harness these methane reserves for energy production?
- 24gttghh 10y agoThat's basically what Natural Gas is. While it appears to burn the "cleanest" out of the fossil fuels, it still releases CO2 emmisions.
- Diederich 10y agoRight. Many roots of the modern environmental movement trace back to the early 70s where smog in US cities was a thick, visible and almost always present irritant. That, and burning rivers. Very few of us had a clear understanding of global warming and climate change at the time. Indeed, some brief panicked warnings of an impending ice age have been endlessly presented and re-presented as proof that climate science is bogus. The term 'clean' was really all about particulate emissions. The shit that polluted the air and the water in visible ways. CO2 and methane missions are invisible and odorless, and so weren't really considered at the time. I'm not an expert on chemistry, but I believe that CO2 pretty much HAS to come out of any energy producing reaction of fossil fuels.
- jaequery 10y agoare we in global warming or global cooling? it seems the scientists or the media change this around every now and then, which in turn they now call it just climate change.
- dundercoder 10y agoI don't know if there truly is an actual consensus in the scientific community, but it is true that an aggregate warming of the earth as a whole will cause some hot spots to become cooler, and some cool spots to warm, some deserts to recover, and some wet regions to loose their rainfall. "Change" is a good word.
- greglindahl 10y agoIn particular it's the case that some of Antarctica has been cooling: http://www.asoc.org/advocacy/climate-change-and-the-antarctic http://www.asoc.org/advocacy/climate-change-and-the-antarcti... Change is a good word, except when it causes the general public to be confused about what the average is (warming.)
- Diederich 10y agoSea ice coverage in Antarctica is interesting. Until the last couple of years, it's been at all-time highs, but it has crashed big-time: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/ http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-i... click over to Antarctica.
- astrodust 10y agoThe trend is warmer. The local effects are highly variable as weather patterns are severely impacted by these changes. Warmer means more energy, and more energy means more chaos.
- flukus 10y agoThe consensus has been on warming for as long as any sort of consensus has existed, about 40-50 years now. If you'd done the slightest amount of investigation you'd know this and wouldn't be parroting the standard science-denier line.
- jmcdiesel 10y agoFor anyone who doesn't catch Destination Unknown (TV series), this was a prominent feature in an episode... while its a bad sign for the climate in general, it's at least unlocking 300,000 years of geology and archeology to discover, specifically Wooly Mammoths
- dundercoder 10y agoI can't wait till they bring back one of those! Amazing on so many levels.
- dgudkov 10y agoMelting permafrost exposes ancient organics. I wonder if ancient plants or microorganisms can revive because of this? Or ancient viruses/deceases?
- pg_bot 10y agoActually this has already happened with the Pithovirus which was discovered in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pithovirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pithovirus This virus is also interesting because it is orders of magnitude larger than previously known viruses.
- pmontra 10y agoThe main cause of destruction in Ballard's The Drowned World (1962) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drowned_World https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drowned_World was the accelerated erosion due to melting permafrost after a global warming event. Raising sea levels was minor in comparison. The original cause of global warming was not increasing methane or CO2 levels but solar tempests. We had other concerns back then. Interestingly the novel is set in 2145, which is not entirely impossible if we want to project the current trend to meet that ending.
- rodionos 10y agoThe Batagaika crater on Google maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Batagaika+Crater/@67.5875202,134.7422223,7634m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x5bbfe8605f075181:0x5c183f59b6ae6d2!8m2!3d67.5804711!4d134.7728746 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Batagaika+Crater/@67.58752... There are a lot of lakes around that look like craters, just filled with water. Maybe 'crater' is a wrong term to apply to this formation.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- phkahler 10y agoFavorite line: "For example, 125,000 years ago, the climate was going through an interglacial period, during which it was several degrees warmer than it is now." And yet people keep saying our current conditions are unprecedented...
- knz 10y agoIt's unprecedented to experience that change with a population of 7 billion. 125,000 years ago we didn't have millions of people totally reliant upon just in time food shipped in from distant locations or have massive settlements in areas significantly affected by climate change.
- jackmott 10y agoand the rate of warming was orders of magnitude slower.
- jackmott 10y agoThat is correct, the rate of change right now is unprecedented by several orders of magnitude, saving for a couple of events in the last 1 billion years, caused by similarly unusual circumstances, during which mass extinctions occurred, which is why there is concern.
- elipsey 10y agoArticle include hilarious hydrology misquote of the day: "vapid transpiration".