The Weather Notebook: GCC#12-Permafrost

GCC#12-Permafrost
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook's weekly segment on Global Climate Change.

If the earth's temperatures continue to rise, climate scientists worry that permafrost, the permanently frozen rock and soils in the sub-arctic, will start to melt and release carbon, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Amy Mayer reports.

Ted Schuur is a University of Florida botany professor. So it's quite a commute to his research sites in Alaska. This year, he's making an even longer jaunt to a Russian research station in Siberia. He's after samples of the permafrost.

TS: The question that we're particularly focused on with permafrost is really the effect of after the climate does change. So what we're interested in is what happens when the permafrost, which has been here for the past 10,000 years, what happens when that melts.

Schuur will compare Russian permafrost to Alaska's. He says Siberia's has unique Pleistocene sediments.

TS: They're called yetamin sediments. And they've trapped a lot of organic matter in them, and they're very old, it's from the last ice age and that mineral soil trapped organic matter is what's frozen in this permafrost.

As Permafrost melts the carbon contained in organic matter could be released into the air as Carbon Dioxide. This happens because microbes become more active when the soil thaws and they begin to decompose the trapped organic matter. Schuur says that process could potentially release more carbon than the fossil fuels burned annually.

TS: If you put some CO2 in the atmosphere, temperatures increase and that causes more carbons to be released from soils leading to more CO2 in the atmosphere, and you have this potential for a runaway greenhouse effect.

Amy Mayer reports from Fairbanks, Alaska. Our series on global climate change is supported by the New England Science Center Collaborative and the Roy A. Hunt Foundation. Thanks today to producer Margaret Landsman.