PLEA Network

12 December 2019, Vox, Scientists feared unstoppable emissions from melting permafrost. They may have already started. Every year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration releases an Arctic Report Card, detailing the state of the frozen world at the top of the globe. And each year, its findings grow more dire. This year, the report revealed that the Arctic itself may now be contributing to climate change. That’s because Arctic soil contains a lot of carbon, which would stay there if the planet wasn’t warming. As the frozen ground across the Arctic starts to thaw, it releases that carbon, which turns into a greenhouse gas. Some of that carbon gets taken up by plants growing in the summertime, but more and more of it is now escaping into the atmosphere. “Thawing permafrost throughout the Arctic could be releasing an estimated 300-600 million tons of net carbon per year to the atmosphere,” the NOAA writes in the report. That’s roughly the equivalent of Japan’s annual emissions. And those emissions are going to increase. “We think that should be two to three times bigger by the end of the century based on the kind of forecasting we’ve done,” Ted Schuur, an ecologist and the author of the report’s section on permafrost, said. Read more here