Permafrost The permafrost regions of the Arctic, often referred to as nature’s iceboxes, contain tremendous amounts of carbon, mainly in the form of animal and vegetable matter accumulated in frozen [...] considered in permafrost emission estimates so far. As they report in the journal Nature Geoscience, abrupt thaw processes, which are possible in ca. five percent of all Arctic permafrost landscapes, could
Permafrost The Arctic is warming more strongly than any other region on Earth, which leads to serious erosion of coasts where organic matter was frozen in the permafrost for thousands of years. Once
in the Arctic are no longer just the domain of scientists. The shrinking sea ice and collapsing permafrost coasts are now also becoming topics on the agenda of international politics and industry. To be
Coastal erosion in the Arctic The thawing and erosion of Arctic permafrost coasts has dramatically increased in the past years and the sea is now consuming more than 20 meters of land per year at some
Permafrost The fate of permafrost - soil that is frozen for 2 or more years - is of huge importance for the global climate because of the large amounts of organic carbon stored in it, which can be released
Permafrost For years now, scientists have been investigating how the gradual thawing of near-surface permafrost, which takes place in the uppermost layers of Arctic soils and in the course of decades [...] another phenomenon, which has only been sporadically investigated: the abrupt thawing of ice-rich permafrost, which can transform entire landscapes in only months of years through subsidence, the formation
Permafrost In the future, climate change could abruptly increase the amount of methane released by lakes in the permafrost regions of the Arctic. The explanation: because of thawing permafrost, these
apparent scars in the world’s permafrost regions. As the new global comparative study conducted by the international permafrost network GTN-P shows, in all regions with permafrost soils the temperature of the
Permafrost Beavers are highly effective ecosystem engineers: if a given landscape isn’t quite to their liking, they simply rearrange the terrain. And that’s what they’ve been doing for millennia in [...] to their findings, the animals could change entire ecosystems and contribute to the thawing of permafrost soils, as they report in the journal Global Change Biology.
Nature Communications Study The loss of arctic permafrost deposits by coastal erosion could amplify climate warming via the greenhouse effect. A study using sediment samples from the Sea of Okhotsk [...] Okhotsk on the eastern coast of Russia led by AWI researchers revealed that the loss of Arctic permafrost at the end of the last glacial period led to repeated sudden increases in the carbon dioxide concentration