Here she goes...
Aug. 12th, 2005 03:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
growler_southClimate warning as Siberia melts
The world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.
The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.
[Kirpotin] says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".
Siberia's peat bogs formed around 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Since then they have been generating methane, most of which has been trapped within the permafrost, and sometimes deeper in ice-like structures known as clathrates. Larry Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates that the west Siberian bog alone contains some 70 billion tonnes of methane, a quarter of all the methane stored on the land surface worldwide.
If the bogs remain wet, as is the case in western Siberia today, then the methane will be released straight into the atmosphere. Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.
In May this year, Katey Walter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks told a meeting in Washington of the Arctic Research Consortium of the US that she had found methane hotspots in eastern Siberia, where the gas was bubbling from thawing permafrost so fast it was preventing the surface from freezing, even in the midst of winter.
"Several hundred billion tonnes of carbon could be released," said the project's chief scientist, Pep Canadell of the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra, Australia.
From issue 2512 of New Scientist magazine, 11 August 2005, page 12
The world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.
The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.
[Kirpotin] says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".
Siberia's peat bogs formed around 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Since then they have been generating methane, most of which has been trapped within the permafrost, and sometimes deeper in ice-like structures known as clathrates. Larry Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates that the west Siberian bog alone contains some 70 billion tonnes of methane, a quarter of all the methane stored on the land surface worldwide.
If the bogs remain wet, as is the case in western Siberia today, then the methane will be released straight into the atmosphere. Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.
In May this year, Katey Walter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks told a meeting in Washington of the Arctic Research Consortium of the US that she had found methane hotspots in eastern Siberia, where the gas was bubbling from thawing permafrost so fast it was preventing the surface from freezing, even in the midst of winter.
"Several hundred billion tonnes of carbon could be released," said the project's chief scientist, Pep Canadell of the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra, Australia.
From issue 2512 of New Scientist magazine, 11 August 2005, page 12
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 05:06 am (UTC)I hate my president.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 06:42 am (UTC)Geee, we're soooo fucking up the planet...
anyone....
Date: 2005-08-12 07:10 am (UTC)Bollocks, we gotta keep thinking/inovating, there is a way out of everything. When we built the new place here I almost got a written warning for the amount I spent on environ-friendly construct and energy save but every little counts, especially on a commercial scale. On a personal scale plant trees in your garden, buy energy efficient appliances, do you need a tumbledrier? (the answer is NO btw). We planted 10 acres of broadleaf on the farm, it only cost a few thou and in a few years it'll be nicely stocked with yummy things ready to be shot for the table. Win/win.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 09:47 am (UTC)did you see the snow in Oz...
we had a tornado in Birmingham a couple of weeks ago...
a slow Apocalypse?
no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 01:36 pm (UTC)Kinda ironic that we could be wiped out by the main component of farts.
This is actually a complaint about cattle: they are a major source of greenhouse gases due to flatulence.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 02:23 pm (UTC)What a way to go.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 01:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 01:27 pm (UTC)