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Do you think that global warming is just melting ice caps and glaciers? Well, think again! It’s also thawing permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere.
You may have noticed that, recently, the news talks a lot about animals that lived during the ice age who, after dying, got preserved in the ice for thousands of years. This is because paleontologists have been finding a lot more of these animals in recent years.
And while, as a paleontologist, I’m excited to learn that these now-extinct animals are being found, helping us better understand life on our planet, I’m a bit worried. Talking to my peers, I can see that they are, too.
There’s a reason we are finding more of these specimens locked up for years, and it’s not that our paleontological fieldwork technologies have advanced dramatically overnight.
As the Arctic warms, permafrost, the frozen ground that blankets much of the Northern Hemisphere, has begun to thaw. The issue is that this process exposes enormous amounts of soil organic carbon (SOC) that have been locked away for millennia.
This frozen ground poses a tricky question: how much of this carbon will escape into the atmosphere, and what will that mean for our climate? |
