Posted on 06/15/2006 1:05:52 PM PDT by Abathar
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ancient roots and bones locked in long-frozen soil in Siberia are starting to thaw, and have the potential to unleash billions of tons of carbon and accelerate global warming, scientists said on Thursday.
This vast carbon reservoir, contained in permafrost soil in northeastern Siberia, contains about 75 times more carbon than the amount released into the atmosphere each year by the burning of fossil fuels, the researchers said in a statement.
Siberia isn't the only place on Earth with massive lodes of permafrost -- parts of Alaska, Canada and northern Europe have them too. The Siberian area is possibly the world's largest, covering nearly 400,000 square miles, with an average depth of 82 feet, and probably holds about 500 billion metric tons of carbon.
By any measure, this is a lot, and it is in fact twice what scientists previously believed was there, ecologist Ted Schuur of the University of Florida said in a telephone interview.
"There's a huge pool of carbon, even more than people thought before, perhaps double the amount of carbon that we thought," said Schuur, one of the article's co-authors. "If you have twice as much carbon there, essentially in the future twice as much could be released into the atmosphere."
Cars, power plants and other fossil fuel burners release at least 6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, contributing to global warming, the scientists said.
As the Siberian permafrost thaws, it will release the carbon contained in old grass roots and buried animal bones into the atmosphere, in what could be an unstoppable contributor to global climate change, according to the researchers.
Earlier climate models may have failed to account for this possible component of global warming, he said.
Schuur said this source of atmospheric carbon could create a vicious global warming cycle.
"You have anthropogenic (human-generated) carbon that's making things a little bit warmer, and that causes the permafrost to warm up and carbon is then released from the permafrost," he said. "It goes into the atmosphere and makes things warmer yet again, so then more permafrost thaws."
If all Siberian permafrost thawed and released its carbon in the form of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, it could nearly double the 730 billion metric tons of carbon now in the atmosphere, the scientists said.
Anybody know how much more arable land is being created due to global warming?
Oh, sorry, I forgot. We can't use land for such an earth-hurting use such as planting.
Billions of humans and other mammals exhaling will cause the most.....?????? We're doomed, fergit it Dean, fergit it McManiac, fergit it hillary, fergitmit kerry, it's over!!!
"Did I forget anything?"
Ted Kennedy.
Bird flu
You can't focus on just one thing. Even if the earth was warming there is no evidence that people are causing it.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
I'm sure there are a few, but others will contribute. :-)
If you get enough, you could work 'em into some song lyrics, a~la:
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, "The King and I" and "The Catcher in the Rye"
Eisenhower, vaccine, England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye
Um...so? what's the connection? All that stored carbon is NOT going to suddenly be released atmospherically in 2007. Fact is, it's mostly just gonna sit there.
I guess they'll have to rename it "tempofrost".
It won't. Hysterical ignorance.
BTW: What enviros don't notice is that CO2 is plant food - more CO2 means more and happier plants (that's good, right?).
Fire ants!
How did all that Carbon get locked up in the permafrost? I mean how did all those plants grow and animals live in all those permafrost conditions?
You'd almost think it was warmer in Siberia at some point in the past few million years or so (when CO2 levels were supposedly lower than today's record 380 ppm.)
And of course, once the temperature shoots up another degree, the ice caps will melt in a matter of minutes, causing the oceans to rise so fast that millions of people on the coast will be swept away by the floods on their way home from the grocery store... then all THOSE bodies will rot, releasing MORE carbon, and then ALL the ice will melt and the WHOLE WORLD will be under water and all the people will be dead and the problem will be solved. So really, there's nothing to worry about.
Thank you. Glad you pointed out the obvious. Using that reasoning, we should immediately pave over all green areas to prevent release of carbon from anything organic. Jeeez...
Don't forget AIDS. AIDS AIDS AIDS. Everybody has AIDS.
What ever happened to the Killer Bees?
We could just burn it? bwahahahahaha! You are right we are all doomed!
One day in the life of Ivan Envirowackovitch.
Wow, the 'Chicken Little Syndrome' hard at work.
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