Melting Permafrost Below Arctic Lakes Is Even More Dangerous to the Climate, NASA Warns

 

https://www.space.com/41533-abrupt-permafrost-melting-carbon-climate-impact.html

 

Scientists have worried for years that rising temperatures will free carbon trapped in frozen soil in the Arctic, accelerating the pace of climate change — but now they believe abrupt thawing below lakes is even more dangerous.

That’s the finding of a new paper published as part of a 10-year NASA collaboration to study how climate change will play out in the icy Arctic region.

 

 

“We don’t have to wait 200 or 300 years to get these large releases of permafrost carbon,” lead study author Katey Walter Anthony, an ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said in a NASA statement about the research. “Within my lifetime, my children’s lifetime, it should be ramping up. It’s already happening but it’s not happening at a really fast rate right now, but within a few decades, it should peak.” [Climate Change Strengthens Earth’s ‘Heartbeat’ — and That’s Bad News