23 ms·

Permafrost is thawing in the Arctic so fast scientists lost their equipment

171 points by jonbaer 8y ago

Mindphreaker 8y ago
This gives me a chilling reminder of The Swarm - A Novel Of The Deep by Frank Schätzing. Interesting novel with quite some scientific background.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Interesting. He concretizes unforeseen consequences of screwing with the global ecosystem. I'm not sure that it's useful, though. Reality is frightening enough. I've lived through a few situations where I did something stupid, and surprising stuff happened. Too quickly to do anything about, but slowly enough to appreciate how bad it was going to be. My first faceplant on a snowboard, for example. So anyway, regarding global climate change, the last 30 years has been like that. And surprises just keep coming.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    Well reality certainly will be if it turns out permafrost thawing is a tipping point we're blithely passing.
perfunctory 8y ago
"Instead of a few centimetres of thaw a year, several metres of soil can destabilize within days. Landscapes collapse into sinkholes. Hillsides slide away to expose deep permafrost that would otherwise have remained insulated."
adrianN 8y ago
I'm continuously surprised how we're not in full-on panic mode because of climate change.
- mirimir 8y ago
  A common response to "full-on panic mode" is denial. Especially when it all seems inevitable. As this arguably is.
- fsloth 8y ago
  We're fully dependent on hydrocarbons and no one has any idea how to replace those in any foreseeable future. https://www.ft.com/content/73650984-135a-11e9-a168-d45595ad076d https://www.ft.com/content/73650984-135a-11e9-a168-d45595ad0... "...renewables (including biofuels, waste and hydro) are responsible for almost the same share of energy today (14 per cent) as supplied in 1971 " We can shave of percentages by stopping eating meat and so on but fossil fuels are still the major culprit in carbon emissions. From economical point of view it's catastrophe today (just stopping using fossil fuels cold turkey will destroy the economic structure of our civilization) versus catastrophe tomorrow.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    The first official warning by an expert panel to the US President was 1965. We did pretty much nothing since then to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel. We could have for example switched all electricity generation to nuclear with 1965 technology and changed building standards to require proper insulation and electric or district heating. That would have bought a lot of time that we don't have now. We could also have instituted a carbon tax and slowly (over the course of the last fifty years or so!) pinned it to the cost of extracting carbon from the atmosphere.
    - ahje 8y ago
      Coulda, woulda, shoulda. We're here now, we can't change the past, and blaming previous generations is a waste of time when we need to act now. Most of us know what to do. We just need to start doing it.
      - adrianN 8y ago
        What do we need to do? I don't see how we can reduce carbon emissions by 18% per year for the next ten years. Right now we don't even get the second derivative right, emission rates are still on the rise. It doesn't really look like our politicians worldwide will start an effort comparable to ramping up the WW2 war industry to decarbonize the economy in the next decade. On the contrary, conservative climate denialists are on the rise. https://mobile.twitter.com/rahmstorf/status/1070717050430070787 https://mobile.twitter.com/rahmstorf/status/1070717050430070...
RikNieu 8y ago
Well this is terrifying.
netsharc 8y ago
As Feynman said, nature cannot be fooled. A rise of 3 degrees between say 19 C to 22 C may not feel that bad for us humans, but a rise of 3 degrees between -2 C to 1 C passes through the point where water changes from solid to liquid...
- adrianN 8y ago
  Wet-bulb temperatures exceeding 35°C are deadly to humans. Already with the current +1 degree warming we see some heat waves reaching close to those temperatures. So a few degrees more in humid climates can actually feel very bad to humans too.
  - whenchamenia 8y ago
    Having lived in the south where the tempurature can be that high for days at a time, nobody was dropping dead.
    - inscionent 8y ago
      Nobody? There were 108 heat related deaths in the US in 2018. https://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/hazstats.shtml https://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/hazstats.shtml A 25 day US heat wave killed 1,000 in 1980. https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1350&dat=19800719&id=dz1PAAAAIBAJ&sjid=lAIEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6301,7793&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1350&dat=19800719&id=... Heat is dangerous especially to those in sensitive groups and to say otherwise is dishonest.
      - kbutler 8y ago
        During 2006–2010, 10,649 deaths of U.S. residents were attributed to weather-related causes of death (Table 2). Exposure to excessive natural heat, heat stroke, sun stroke, or all were cited as either the underlying cause or a contributing cause of death for 3,332 (31%) of these deaths, and exposure to excessive natural cold, hypothermia, or both was cited for 6,660 (63%) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr076.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr076.pdf And most global warming mitigates cold extremes rather than increasing hot extremes (polar amplification, increased night-time temperatures, etc.).
ThinkBeat 8y ago
I am post-panic at this point, into apathy. We are already screwed and we do not have enough time to fix things. Embrace the suck. Change is not difficult really, but the majority do not want to make deep sacrifices and would rather be a happy fat cat.
- fao_ 8y ago
  > Change is not difficult really, but the majority do not want to make deep sacrifices and would rather be a happy fat cat. The 90s dotcom boom took some vaguely 'smart' people, then gave them enough money that they are the richest people in the world. These people now sit on their asses and donate pitiful amounts of their money away (Bezos donating 30,000 to a couple of children is the equivalent of an investment banker tossing a spare 5p coin at a homeless person. Sure, it's better than nothing, but it's less than the bare minimum that we should expect. For comparison, if less than two thirds of the 1.1bn raised for the Notre Dame were donated to Flint, Michighan, then the people there could be drinking clean water by now...) to keep people appeased while the people working for them (in the case of, say, Amazon) literally starve and faint from exhaustion, and get less than minimum wage for it. I do not think you mean 'the majority'. I think you mean, the three bus-loads of ~90 CEOs and middle executives that, if they happened to crash/explode, would literally solve climate change overnight. The report found that more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 – the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established – can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities. The scale of historical emissions associated with these fossil fuel producers is large enough to have contributed significantly to climate change, according to the report. and A Carbon Tracker study in 2015 found that fossil fuel companies risked wasting more than $2tn over the coming decade by pursuing coal, oil and gas projects that could be worthless in the face of international action on climate change and advances in renewables – in turn posing substantial threats to investor returns.
  - artimaeis 8y ago
    > "I think you mean, the three bus-loads of ~90 CEOs and middle executives that, if they happened to crash/explode, would literally solve climate change overnight." No matter how many executives you propose to eliminate, the consumer demand for the goods those companies provide is unlikely to go away. People consume energy and it's unlikely that we'll be able to reduce our usage meaningfully in the near future. If we want to meaningfully reduce energy usage it's going to take organized collective efforts around the planet.
mhandley 8y ago
I'm a little confused on this issue. How did all that carbon end up in the permafrost soils in the first place? Presumably because the climate was warmer, and vegetation grew and locked up carbon there. So now the climate there is warming, won't vegetation growth take off again? I'm not denying there's the potential for lots of CO2 and methane to be released, but also there's the potential for more CO2 to be locked up too. At what point does the process switch over from releasing greenhouse gasses to vegetation removing them again?
- taneq 8y ago
  The issue isn't really that the world is going to turn into an inhospitable dustball or watery doom. It's that climate change is going to obliterate the apple cart for humanity. We like to build big complicated high-cost centers right on the coast. Rising sea water = bad for us. We like to build expensive permanent buildings. Crazy weather = bad for us. We like to farm monocultures in predictable climates. Unstable seasons = bad for us. 'Life' is going to be just fine. It's just gonna be super inconvenient for us humans.
  - mhandley 8y ago
    Actually "life" isn't going to be just fine - we're going to lose a lot of biodiversity along the way too, and the less we do to prevent warming, the more we'll lose. But my question wasn't about the big picture - it was about the specifics of permafrost thawing.
    - taneq 8y ago
      We're always losing a lot of biodiversity, and we're always gaining more through evolution. That's how it works. I'm not trivialising the current mass extinction event. It's not great. But pinch points like these have a way of producing some of the best performing creatures we've ever seen.
      - sandworm101 8y ago
        We will one day gain new biodiversity, but not on human timescales. Evolution moves far far slower than climate change. We are going to loose many things.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
It's called "spring". In Alberta there is a weather phenomenon known as the "chinook" that causes rapid melting of snow and ice. The CBC is a propaganda outlet of the Canadian government, in case you are not familiar with the news source. Is it true, that 20000 years ago, most of Canada was covered by glaciers? What man caused actions led to the warming back then?
gxx 8y ago
Thawing permafrost, faster even than climate models predicted, could release so much carbon that feasible reductions in human carbon output will never be enough. [1] A similar worry is methane hydrates. [2] It seems that the only remaining hopes are rapid progress on carbon sequestration on a vast scale, or risky geoengineering. [1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-24/thawing-permafrost-could-have-catastrophic-consequences-scientists-warn https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-24/thawing-permafrost-co... [2] https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/energy/methane-hydrates/ https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/energy/methane-hydrate...
- YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
  It has to be geo-engineering. Where are you going to find energy to recapture carbon? Renewables and nuclear are a joke compared to carbon fuels: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
- kbutler 8y ago
  "the idea of a ‘methane time bomb’ coming from warming sediments and permafrost is one thing we don't have to worry about in connection with global warming," "The researchers believe that soil and marine bacteria that feed on frozen fossil methane as it melts may explain its limited release, by preventing the methane from ever reaching the atmosphere." https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/natural-methane-time-bomb-unlikely-wreak-climate-havoc https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/natural-methane-time-bomb-unli...
  - justin66 8y ago
    I think someone yesterday made a comment here about the value or otherwise of university press releases. That quote is pretty cringey when you think about the effect it will have on the average layperson's understanding of the problem. The abstract at Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23316 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23316 A longer explainer at Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/548403a https://www.nature.com/articles/548403a
    - 8y ago
gdubs 8y ago
The appendix of last year’s IPCC report contained a list of potential solutions. Repairing damaged soil was high on the list. Trees are an obvious thing; we should be planting large numbers of trees. Large scale reforestation as well as everywhere else we can fit them. But soil holds the potential to sequester an enormous amount of carbon. Degraded soil lacks microbial life. If usually ends up that way from conventional farming and poor land management. Repairing it would mean moving away from conventional monocrop farming towards rotational grazing [and other alternative practices]. A good reason to eat mostly local food from small organic farms, and if you eat beef to at least make sure it’s grass fed, pasture raised. This also cuts down on the carbon cost of transporting food halfway across the world in trucks and planes. (Those transportation costs are not factored into the EPAs estimates for how much agriculture contribute to climate change. Neither are the emissions generated in producing all the chemicals used in agriculture. They also don’t factor in how much carbon would be sequestered in all the acreage currently used for conventional farming, if it were to be replaced with practices like Silvopasture and agroforestry, or healthy pastures.) The issue of climate change is a systemic one. A centralized food production system that relies on fossil fuels for both inputs and outputs (petrochemicals as well as transportation) has resulted in a society of sprawl. You don’t have to have a farm down the block anymore, and you can drive 30 miles to work. It’s all connected. One idea is we can move back to a model of small local farms, keeping communities more tightly knitted and less sprawled. That would limit food choices more towards what’s in season, or has a long shelf life. Arguably, while limited by seasonality, the food would taste better since these days we engineer for transportability over taste. Another option would be to keep with a centralized model but rapidly decarbonize it; electric trains, agroforestry, etc. I personally think the decentralized model has the potential to be very beautiful. But we should be pragmatic and take whatever the best elements are of either path and just start making changes.
La-ang 8y ago
It's a clusterf
lurquer 8y ago
Why doesn't the article provide any temperature data showing, one would think, some unusual increase? 'Climate Change' doesn't make things melt: heat does.

171 points by jonbaer 8y ago

This gives me a chilling reminder of The Swarm - A Novel Of The Deep by Frank Schätzing. Interesting novel with quite some scientific background.

mirimir 8y ago
Interesting. He concretizes unforeseen consequences of screwing with the global ecosystem. I'm not sure that it's useful, though. Reality is frightening enough. I've lived through a few situations where I did something stupid, and surprising stuff happened. Too quickly to do anything about, but slowly enough to appreciate how bad it was going to be. My first faceplant on a snowboard, for example. So anyway, regarding global climate change, the last 30 years has been like that. And surprises just keep coming.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Well reality certainly will be if it turns out permafrost thawing is a tipping point we're blithely passing.

perfunctory 8y ago

"Instead of a few centimetres of thaw a year, several metres of soil can destabilize within days. Landscapes collapse into sinkholes. Hillsides slide away to expose deep permafrost that would otherwise have remained insulated."

adrianN 8y ago

I'm continuously surprised how we're not in full-on panic mode because of climate change.

mirimir 8y ago
A common response to "full-on panic mode" is denial. Especially when it all seems inevitable. As this arguably is.
fsloth 8y ago
We're fully dependent on hydrocarbons and no one has any idea how to replace those in any foreseeable future. https://www.ft.com/content/73650984-135a-11e9-a168-d45595ad076d https://www.ft.com/content/73650984-135a-11e9-a168-d45595ad0... "...renewables (including biofuels, waste and hydro) are responsible for almost the same share of energy today (14 per cent) as supplied in 1971 " We can shave of percentages by stopping eating meat and so on but fossil fuels are still the major culprit in carbon emissions. From economical point of view it's catastrophe today (just stopping using fossil fuels cold turkey will destroy the economic structure of our civilization) versus catastrophe tomorrow.
- adrianN 8y ago
  The first official warning by an expert panel to the US President was 1965. We did pretty much nothing since then to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel. We could have for example switched all electricity generation to nuclear with 1965 technology and changed building standards to require proper insulation and electric or district heating. That would have bought a lot of time that we don't have now. We could also have instituted a carbon tax and slowly (over the course of the last fifty years or so!) pinned it to the cost of extracting carbon from the atmosphere.
  - ahje 8y ago
    Coulda, woulda, shoulda. We're here now, we can't change the past, and blaming previous generations is a waste of time when we need to act now. Most of us know what to do. We just need to start doing it.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      What do we need to do? I don't see how we can reduce carbon emissions by 18% per year for the next ten years. Right now we don't even get the second derivative right, emission rates are still on the rise. It doesn't really look like our politicians worldwide will start an effort comparable to ramping up the WW2 war industry to decarbonize the economy in the next decade. On the contrary, conservative climate denialists are on the rise. https://mobile.twitter.com/rahmstorf/status/1070717050430070787 https://mobile.twitter.com/rahmstorf/status/1070717050430070...

RikNieu 8y ago

Well this is terrifying.

netsharc 8y ago

As Feynman said, nature cannot be fooled. A rise of 3 degrees between say 19 C to 22 C may not feel that bad for us humans, but a rise of 3 degrees between -2 C to 1 C passes through the point where water changes from solid to liquid...

adrianN 8y ago
Wet-bulb temperatures exceeding 35°C are deadly to humans. Already with the current +1 degree warming we see some heat waves reaching close to those temperatures. So a few degrees more in humid climates can actually feel very bad to humans too.
- whenchamenia 8y ago
  Having lived in the south where the tempurature can be that high for days at a time, nobody was dropping dead.
  - inscionent 8y ago
    Nobody? There were 108 heat related deaths in the US in 2018. https://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/hazstats.shtml https://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/hazstats.shtml A 25 day US heat wave killed 1,000 in 1980. https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1350&dat=19800719&id=dz1PAAAAIBAJ&sjid=lAIEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6301,7793&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1350&dat=19800719&id=... Heat is dangerous especially to those in sensitive groups and to say otherwise is dishonest.
    - kbutler 8y ago
      During 2006–2010, 10,649 deaths of U.S. residents were attributed to weather-related causes of death (Table 2). Exposure to excessive natural heat, heat stroke, sun stroke, or all were cited as either the underlying cause or a contributing cause of death for 3,332 (31%) of these deaths, and exposure to excessive natural cold, hypothermia, or both was cited for 6,660 (63%) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr076.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr076.pdf And most global warming mitigates cold extremes rather than increasing hot extremes (polar amplification, increased night-time temperatures, etc.).

ThinkBeat 8y ago

I am post-panic at this point, into apathy. We are already screwed and we do not have enough time to fix things. Embrace the suck. Change is not difficult really, but the majority do not want to make deep sacrifices and would rather be a happy fat cat.

fao_ 8y ago
> Change is not difficult really, but the majority do not want to make deep sacrifices and would rather be a happy fat cat. The 90s dotcom boom took some vaguely 'smart' people, then gave them enough money that they are the richest people in the world. These people now sit on their asses and donate pitiful amounts of their money away (Bezos donating 30,000 to a couple of children is the equivalent of an investment banker tossing a spare 5p coin at a homeless person. Sure, it's better than nothing, but it's less than the bare minimum that we should expect. For comparison, if less than two thirds of the 1.1bn raised for the Notre Dame were donated to Flint, Michighan, then the people there could be drinking clean water by now...) to keep people appeased while the people working for them (in the case of, say, Amazon) literally starve and faint from exhaustion, and get less than minimum wage for it. I do not think you mean 'the majority'. I think you mean, the three bus-loads of ~90 CEOs and middle executives that, if they happened to crash/explode, would literally solve climate change overnight. The report found that more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 – the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established – can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities. The scale of historical emissions associated with these fossil fuel producers is large enough to have contributed significantly to climate change, according to the report. and A Carbon Tracker study in 2015 found that fossil fuel companies risked wasting more than $2tn over the coming decade by pursuing coal, oil and gas projects that could be worthless in the face of international action on climate change and advances in renewables – in turn posing substantial threats to investor returns.
- artimaeis 8y ago
  > "I think you mean, the three bus-loads of ~90 CEOs and middle executives that, if they happened to crash/explode, would literally solve climate change overnight." No matter how many executives you propose to eliminate, the consumer demand for the goods those companies provide is unlikely to go away. People consume energy and it's unlikely that we'll be able to reduce our usage meaningfully in the near future. If we want to meaningfully reduce energy usage it's going to take organized collective efforts around the planet.

mhandley 8y ago

I'm a little confused on this issue. How did all that carbon end up in the permafrost soils in the first place? Presumably because the climate was warmer, and vegetation grew and locked up carbon there. So now the climate there is warming, won't vegetation growth take off again? I'm not denying there's the potential for lots of CO2 and methane to be released, but also there's the potential for more CO2 to be locked up too. At what point does the process switch over from releasing greenhouse gasses to vegetation removing them again?

taneq 8y ago
The issue isn't really that the world is going to turn into an inhospitable dustball or watery doom. It's that climate change is going to obliterate the apple cart for humanity. We like to build big complicated high-cost centers right on the coast. Rising sea water = bad for us. We like to build expensive permanent buildings. Crazy weather = bad for us. We like to farm monocultures in predictable climates. Unstable seasons = bad for us. 'Life' is going to be just fine. It's just gonna be super inconvenient for us humans.
- mhandley 8y ago
  Actually "life" isn't going to be just fine - we're going to lose a lot of biodiversity along the way too, and the less we do to prevent warming, the more we'll lose. But my question wasn't about the big picture - it was about the specifics of permafrost thawing.
  - taneq 8y ago
    We're always losing a lot of biodiversity, and we're always gaining more through evolution. That's how it works. I'm not trivialising the current mass extinction event. It's not great. But pinch points like these have a way of producing some of the best performing creatures we've ever seen.
    - sandworm101 8y ago
      We will one day gain new biodiversity, but not on human timescales. Evolution moves far far slower than climate change. We are going to loose many things.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

It's called "spring". In Alberta there is a weather phenomenon known as the "chinook" that causes rapid melting of snow and ice. The CBC is a propaganda outlet of the Canadian government, in case you are not familiar with the news source. Is it true, that 20000 years ago, most of Canada was covered by glaciers? What man caused actions led to the warming back then?

gxx 8y ago

Thawing permafrost, faster even than climate models predicted, could release so much carbon that feasible reductions in human carbon output will never be enough. [1] A similar worry is methane hydrates. [2] It seems that the only remaining hopes are rapid progress on carbon sequestration on a vast scale, or risky geoengineering. [1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-24/thawing-permafrost-could-have-catastrophic-consequences-scientists-warn https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-24/thawing-permafrost-co... [2] https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/energy/methane-hydrates/ https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/energy/methane-hydrate...

YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
It has to be geo-engineering. Where are you going to find energy to recapture carbon? Renewables and nuclear are a joke compared to carbon fuels: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
kbutler 8y ago
"the idea of a ‘methane time bomb’ coming from warming sediments and permafrost is one thing we don't have to worry about in connection with global warming," "The researchers believe that soil and marine bacteria that feed on frozen fossil methane as it melts may explain its limited release, by preventing the methane from ever reaching the atmosphere." https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/natural-methane-time-bomb-unlikely-wreak-climate-havoc https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/natural-methane-time-bomb-unli...
- justin66 8y ago
  I think someone yesterday made a comment here about the value or otherwise of university press releases. That quote is pretty cringey when you think about the effect it will have on the average layperson's understanding of the problem. The abstract at Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23316 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23316 A longer explainer at Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/548403a https://www.nature.com/articles/548403a
  - 8y ago

gdubs 8y ago

The appendix of last year’s IPCC report contained a list of potential solutions. Repairing damaged soil was high on the list. Trees are an obvious thing; we should be planting large numbers of trees. Large scale reforestation as well as everywhere else we can fit them. But soil holds the potential to sequester an enormous amount of carbon. Degraded soil lacks microbial life. If usually ends up that way from conventional farming and poor land management. Repairing it would mean moving away from conventional monocrop farming towards rotational grazing [and other alternative practices]. A good reason to eat mostly local food from small organic farms, and if you eat beef to at least make sure it’s grass fed, pasture raised. This also cuts down on the carbon cost of transporting food halfway across the world in trucks and planes. (Those transportation costs are not factored into the EPAs estimates for how much agriculture contribute to climate change. Neither are the emissions generated in producing all the chemicals used in agriculture. They also don’t factor in how much carbon would be sequestered in all the acreage currently used for conventional farming, if it were to be replaced with practices like Silvopasture and agroforestry, or healthy pastures.) The issue of climate change is a systemic one. A centralized food production system that relies on fossil fuels for both inputs and outputs (petrochemicals as well as transportation) has resulted in a society of sprawl. You don’t have to have a farm down the block anymore, and you can drive 30 miles to work. It’s all connected. One idea is we can move back to a model of small local farms, keeping communities more tightly knitted and less sprawled. That would limit food choices more towards what’s in season, or has a long shelf life. Arguably, while limited by seasonality, the food would taste better since these days we engineer for transportability over taste. Another option would be to keep with a centralized model but rapidly decarbonize it; electric trains, agroforestry, etc. I personally think the decentralized model has the potential to be very beautiful. But we should be pragmatic and take whatever the best elements are of either path and just start making changes.

La-ang 8y ago

It's a clusterf

lurquer 8y ago

Why doesn't the article provide any temperature data showing, one would think, some unusual increase? 'Climate Change' doesn't make things melt: heat does.