Melting Arctic Permafrost Releases Acid that Dissolves Rocks

As temperatures rise in the Arctic, permafrost — permanently frozen ground — is defrosting at an alarming rate. But the permafrost isn't the only thing in the Arctic that's melting.

Runoff from melting permafrost in Alaska flows toward the sea.

Exposed rock that was once covered in ice is dissolving, eaten away by acid. And the effects of this acid bath could have far-reaching impacts on global climate, according to a new study.

Icy permafrost is rich in minerals, which are released when the ice melts. The minerals then become vulnerable to chemical weathering, or the breakdown of rock through chemical reactions, scientists recently reported. They investigated areas once covered by permafrost in the western Canadian Arctic, finding evidence of weathering caused by sulfuric acid, produced by sulfide minerals that were released when the permafrost melted.

Read the LiveScience story by Mindy Weisberger - “Melting Arctic Permafrost Releases Acid that Dissolves Rocks.”

Data show no sign of methane boost from thawing permafrost

Emissions of carbon dioxide,
but not methane, having risen alongside
warming temperatures in a region of
 northern Alaska, according to an
 analysis of atmospheric measurements
 made at this research station in Barrow.

Decades of atmospheric measurements from a site in northern Alaska show that rapidly rising temperatures there have not significantly increased methane emissions from the neighboring permafrost-covered landscape, researchers reported December 15 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting.

Some scientists feared that Arctic warming would unleash large amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, worsening global warming. “The ticking time bomb of methane has clearly not manifested itself yet,” said study coauthor Colm Sweeney, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Emissions of carbon dioxide — a less potent greenhouse gas — did increase over that period, the researchers found.

Read the ScienceNews story - “Data show no sign of methane boost from thawing permafrost.”

How the Earth will pay back our carbon emissions with … more carbon emissions

A fireman works to extinguish a wildfire
 on a peatland field in
 Ogan Ilir, South Sumatra, Indonesia.

The really scary thing about climate change is not that humans will fail to get their emissions under control. The really scary thing is that at some point, the Earth will take over and start adding even more emissions on its own.

A new study underscores this risk by looking closely at Indonesia, which has a unique quality — some 70 billion of tons of carbon that have built up in peatlands over millennia. In this, Indonesia is much like the Arctic, where even larger quantities of ancient carbon are stored in , and are also vulnerable.

In each case, if that carbon gets out of the land and into the atmosphere, then global warming will get worse. But global warming could itself up the odds of such massive carbon release. That’s a dangerous position to be in as the world continues to warm.

Read The Washington Post story - “How the Earth will pay back our carbon emissions with … more carbon emissions.”

Thawing of permafrost most likely to live up to 'carbon bomb' hype

Of all the climate change issues that have been melodramatically dubbed a "carbon bomb" in recent years—tar sands projects in Alberta, catastrophic wildfires in Indonesia, holes in Australia's seagrass meadows—it seems the thawing of permafrost in the Arctic is most likely to live up to the hype.

There's a staggering amount of methane and carbon dioxide, like hundreds of gigatons worth, trapped under the permanently frozen layer of soil and rock in the form of ice crystals and biomass.

If released due to the ongoing crescendo of warming in the Arctic, it could trigger a global feedback loop and burn us all to a fucking crisp. Yet there's another very real issue associated with thawing permafrost that's received far less attention outside of industry circles, perhaps because of the lack of a catchy apocalyptic phrase to accompany it.

Read the Vice News story - “There Is a New Climate Change Disaster Looming in Northern Canada.”