Melting Arctic ice can signal permafrost thaw and more greenhouse gas emissions

News Update 2: Last summer saw a record Arctic sea ice melt and another record is forecast for this year, according to a new study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). When the sea ice melts, the temperature over land heats up as far as 900 miles away, the study found, and is likely to thaw permafrost in Alaska, Canada and Russia. Permafrost is the long-frozen earth beneath the top layer of ground. When it thaws it releases methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than CO2. It also can cause the collapse of infrastructure, such as highways, houses, oil rigs and pipelines. Last August-October the temperature over land in the west Arctic was unusually warm, more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit above the average for 1978-2006. Rapid sea ice thaw could lead to rapid permafrost thaw, the scientists said. (Source: Reuters PlanetArk)

Massive new study links global warming to physical, biological changes on planet

(Photo of Alps from Flickr and Philippe Tarboureich.)

News Update: An international team of scientists has affirmed and expanded on last year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report by linking human activity and rising temperatures to physical and biological changes observed on Earth over the past 30 years. “The human footprint on the planet is clear,” said one of the authors, Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The study, published in Nature, matched changes like melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, warming lakes and rivers, longer growing seasons, earlier migration and breeding of birds, movement of heat-intolerant species up mountains, and changes in fish communities. They point to a few specifics, by continent: 89 flower species blooming earlier in Europe, melting glaciers in the Alps and in Patagonia, changes in the freeze depth of permafrost in Russia, and a 50% decline in the Emperor penguin on the Antarctic peninsula. Temperature was far more a factor than land use, pollution and population, according to the 30,000 data sets studied. In a second study published in Nature, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was found to be 28% higher than at any time in 800,000 years, according to gas bubbles in ice in Antarctic -- and methane was 124% higher. Both add carbon to the atmosphere. (Sources: E&E News PM, The Daily Green, Planet Ark.)