Permafrost Melt A Worldwide Phenomenon, Engineers & Scientists Concerned

[hatrack]

New data from the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (GTNP) reveal that a warming climate is accelerating thawing of the permafrost—the concrete-like frozen ground found mostly in the far Northern Hemisphere. The rising ground temperature could spell trouble for the vast new energy developments proposed for the high northern latitudes, experts say.

Tracking trends in the permafrost—soil that remains frozen for more than two years—is important because it is a sensitive record keeper of climate change, says Frederick Nelson, a physical geographer at the University of Delaware. New data from the Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring Program, GTNP, and other monitoring programs, presented on December 13 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, clearly show that the permafrost is warming in response to rising air temperatures in the Arctic, he says.

The changes in the permafrost have important implications for the natural gas pipeline planned in Canada’s Mackenzie River Valley in the Northwest Territories, says Chris Burn, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Northern Research Chair at Carleton University in Ottawa. The buried pipeline will carry pressurized gas, chilled to match the surrounding ground temperature. Because the pipe will travel through areas with and without permafrost, there is a risk that the pipe will be either cold or warm enough to freeze or thaw the soil. The resulting subsidence or frost heave could bend the pipe, requiring engineers to cut gas flow to prevent ruptures or institute costly repairs. Therefore, the project's engineers need to predict how permafrost responds to climate change so that they can minimize any thermal disturbance caused by the pipeline.

EDIT

Meanwhile, measurements taken from boreholes in the permafrost at Svalbard, Norway, suggest that ground temperatures have increased by an average of 0.4 °C in the past decade, which is roughly 4 times faster than in the previous century, says Charlie Harris, a permafrost scientist at the Cardiff University (U.K.). Climate warming has boosted soil temperatures in northern Russia by 1 °C over the past 60 years and has increased the thickness of the active layer—the upper surface of the permafrost that thaws in summer—by 20–30 centimeters since the 1950s, according to Tingjun Zhang, a geophysicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Since the late 1960s, the average temperature of permafrost in Canada’s Mackenzie River delta has warmed from –8 to –6.5 °C, Burn says. At the same time, the rising frequency of 10-day intense events of continuous sunshine combined with warm summer temperatures is triggering landslides in parts of Canada’s Arctic, explains Antoni Lewkowicz, a geomorphologist at the University of Ottawa. Meltwater at the bottom of the active layer buoys up slabs of soil nearly 650 meters long that slide off the lubricated surface. Landslides, some on slopes as gentle as 5º, have more than doubled on Ellesmere Island, from 6 per year before 1975 to about 14 per year for the past 25 years, he adds."

EDIT/END

http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2005/mar/science/jp_permafrost.html

[Viking12]

1. Dude, your feedabck stories are starting to create DU feedback

or maybe just sensory overload :hangover: Isn't this like the fourth separate feedback story this week?:scared:

[NNadir]

2. I appreciate Hattrack's diligence in keeping us informed.

I look forward to his "latest breaking" environmental (usually bad because there usually only IS bad) news.

My vote is that Hattrack continue to do exactly what he has been doing.

[Viking12]

3. I hope I wasn't misunderstood.

I VERY much appreciate hatrack's contributions. My post was a flippant repsonse to the recent proliferation of articles specific to positive climate feedbacks, not in any way to be taken as a slam on the his contributions.

[NNadir]

4. I did misunderstand you and thanks for your explanation.

I'm very crotchety lately and I apologize to you for being so.

[Kool Kitty]

9. I second that.

I don't post here much, but I read everything. My thanks to Hattrack and you NNadir, and everyone else here in this forum. Most informative, depressing sometimes, but informative always.

[hatrack]

5. There have been a lot of late, I admit

Maybe there's some carryover from the natural world to cyberspace? If so, I'm going to end up like the mythical bird that flies faster and faster in circles until it finally disappears up its own ass. On the other hand, it'll really boost my typing skills. :hi:

I mean, I'd love to post stories about Girl Scouts picking up litter with Hillary Duff and the Green Bay Packers at a junior high Earth Day fair. To be fair, such events and stories certainly make everybody feel good, and might light a fire in a few peoples' attitudes. But in the big picture they amount to a very small pile of cat logs.

I think that things are pretty much out of our hands at this point. It's been 17 years since the first clear signal went up, back in the summer of 1988 when Hansen went to Capitol Hill. Back then, the weather was explosively hot, the Amazon was burning, dead zones were forming off the Gulf Coast, and the ozone layer was in sorry shape.

Now, in 2005, what has changed? Warming continues, at times hot enough (in 2003) to kill an estimated 30,000 elderly Europeans, the Amazon's still burning and the "enlightened" government of Lula is planning on paving even more roads spanning the forest, the dead zones are bigger than ever and are scattered across the globe, and the latest American action on ozone depletion was to demand more methyl bromide production so as to protect this nation's priceless strawberry farms and golf courses. Oh, and Kyoto? Sorry, Charlie - the latest UK estimates are that US emissions increases alone will cancel out every gain from the treaty even if if every signatory nation hits its target.

Sure, there are maybe 100,000 hybrids on the roads in the US, and everybody's greenwash is much better than it was back in the 1980s, but the fundamental fact hasn't changed: the overwhelming majority of Americans and their political "leaders" are willing to do whatever it takes to deal with environmental problems, provided it doesn't cost anything or personally inconvenience them in any way at all.

I don't think it's about "hope" or "despair" anymore. It's about realizing that we pissed away nearly two decades quibbling, dissembling and lying, it's about looking coldly at the situation and realizing that we're fucked.

But if you have an appreciation for evolutionary biology and geology, you'll realize that it was always out of our hands anyway.

[Dogmudgeon]

6. I have come to rely on your posts

I used to scour the net high and low for energy and climate stories until I discovered that you were doing the same thing, more effectively, and more thorougly. And believe me, I am grateful.

But I may be in a similar state of mind. I still have a little optimism left, but I think the climate change has become self-sustaining. I'm waiting for the Other Shoe to drop with respect to energy, and fear that our bodies themselves are providing a powerful evolutionary engine not for the development of Higher Consciousness but of lethal viruses.

I fail to see how any of this will be resolved without both vision and optimism, but our leaders are predominantly cynics, and the public is largely pessimistic. Our probable fate won't involve personal inconvenience, it will involve losing our world and most of our lives.

Like most people, I think in my arrogant way that I will survive it all by virtue of my superior brain. But my superior brain will probably be put to its most productive use as its constituent nitrogen is returned to the ecosystem.

Maybe we New Apocalyptics are like passengers in a doomed aircraft. Most of our fellow passengers have their eyes screwed shut and are frantically praying to be delivered quickly, while we have our eyes wide open out of a morbid curiosity to see what it will really look like when our last second of existence arrives.

But I'm an idiot. I know we're doomed, but I refuse to give in. I'll keep on trying -- even as the forward section of the plane rushes toward me at the speed of the screams no one will live to remember.

--p!

[Boomer]

7. Too little, too late

>> I don't think it's about "hope" or "despair" anymore. It's about realizing that we pissed away nearly two decades quibbling, dissembling and lying, it's about looking coldly at the situation and realizing that we're fucked. <<

I think the situation has probably been irreversible for many decades, if not for the last century. The last 50 years may have nudged us a little faster along the road to disaster, but the direction is already set. Now, with glaciers and the permafrost melting, we're well beyond being able to set things right again.

I've given up being indignant about our lack of action to "stop" global climate change and have moved on to indignation that we aren't facing how our species will survive the coming changes. There's so much we could do to prepare ourselves -- decentralization of agriculture, revival of disappearing seeds for weather-hardy varieties, passive solar architecture, relearning of old survival skills for subsistence living before everyone who has those skills has died off. The list just goes on and on, but we've got our heads buried in the sand.

>> But if you have an appreciation for evolutionary biology and geology, you'll realize that it was always out of our hands anyway. <<

I would be near suicidal if I didn't keep reminding myself that the Earth has seen the rise and fall of countless species, the near complete decimation of life, time and time again. We may have rushed this particular mass extinction a bit ahead of schedule through carelessness and overuse of resources, but it would have happened eventually. A meteor will always come along and blast us all back to a primordial stage.

Hopefully, by the time the next speciation in in flower, all our styrofoam cups and plastic bags, all our radioactive toys and toxic chemicals, will have completely disintegrated. And Gaia will start writing on a clean slate again.

[Dogmudgeon]

8. Good attitude

I agree with much of it. My main divergence is that I still have a little optimism left. But it's running out. I've watched this global psychodrama play out since its first press run in the early 1970s, and nothing has come of it.

The good news (concerning your post) is that plastic biodegrades rapidly, being a family of organic compounds. Most of the poisons we've sunk into the earth, especially the xenoestrogens, artificial lipids, and nitroso-compounds, also biodegrade pretty fast. But not fast enough to keep humans safe. It only takes a brief exposure to DDT residue to affect one's health, but over the course of a few centuries, it will all be gone. Thermophilic and anaerobic organisms, like those that grow in compost, are efficient "detoxifiers", and no matter how weird the compound may be, they'll eat it or die trying.

I have no anxiety that Gaia won't survive. In fact, even the most pessimistic estimate of the evolution of the Sun indicates that the world has at least 800 million years until solar output bakes us (it's probably more like 2-3 billion years). There is a small chance that we will discover a high-output source of power, maybe like the fabled zero-point energy, and will warm the Earth up to the point where a runaway greenhouse is formed, turning the Earth into a twin of Venus within a few hundred thousand years (but sterilizing the Earth within a millennium). But I think that any future high-tech civilization will be built in space. The Earth is too precious a habitat to risk with the excreta of a high-growth civilization.

There's an even smaller chance that one day Gaia will face an impactor like the one that ripped half of Mars' surface (and probably all its atmosphere) away. But that's not just an Act of God, it's a tantrum.

Even with a major breakdown scenario, a number of people will survive, and the basics of technology will not be lost. I'll leave it as a future project to wonder what lessons and pleas we can make to that future generation so that they will not repeat our epic stupidity.

--p!

[NNadir]

10. I think our neighboring planets have quite a bit to teach us.

I would not be surprised to learn that either or both have had a biotic past, because deep down I have a bias (based more on faith than experimental data) towards believing in an extrasolar, panspermic, origin of life. Indeed it may yet prove possible that certain extremophiles, just the bugs in our volcanic vents survive in one of these places still. Still whatever life they have, if they have life, is tenuous and more than likely without sense.

With this said, to the best of our knowledge, earth is unique. One need not appeal to some set of religious beliefs to acknowledge that among all the places where life is found, earth ought to be regarded as sacred. Here we are as the universe seeing itself, its galactic clusters, its strings of clusters as well as the vibrational modes of the nothingness contained in a single molecule of water.

It is a shame to let this lovely blue eye die for so little, a damned shame.

[Wilms]

11. .

[Boomer]

12. That's one way of looking at it

I tend to have a slightly different perspective.

Life on earth is a tenuous film of pond scum over a hard rock. We, being critters in the scum, tend to like it a lot and ignore the beauty of much larger forces at work in the structure of our planet. And we do tend to give ourselves silly airs about how special we are, but that's okay, every life form needs a hobby.

As for humans in particular, I think there's a very good reason few (if any) other species have reached our level of conceptual thought and manual dexterity -- it's not a good survival technique.

In the short term, we've been fabulously successful; in the long term we have become a devouring force in the fabric of our pond scum. This self-destructive behavior will probably destroy us and a lot of other critters that were simply minding their own business being in harmony with the scum.

So, ultimately, we're an evolutionay dead end.

And good riddance.

[ramapo]

13. Minor quibble

But first let me add my sincere appreciation for Hatrack's diligant posting efforts. I visit the E&E forum at least once a day.

I say we've pissed away at least 25 years as I date the beginning of our delusional government leading an even more deluded citizenry as the day Jimmy Carter was defeated by Ronnie Reagan.

Carter was the last(only?) President to recognize the environmental and energy-related problems awaiting us. It's been all downhill ever since, "Morning in America" notwithstanding.