“Scientists shocked by Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years sooner than predicted”

“Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.

A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia.

“What we saw was amazing,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters. “It’s an indication that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more years.“www.theguardian.com/…”

“Scientists shocked by Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years sooner than predicted”

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Attribution:
Melting Arctic: The Dahlbreen glacier at nighttime. Photograph: Denis Sinyakov/Greenpeace

“Thawing permafrost is one of the tipping points for climate breakdown and it’s happening before our very eyes,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International. “This premature thawing is another clear signal that we must decarbonise our economies, and immediately.”

Scientists shocked by Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years sooner than predicted

  • Ice blocks frozen solid for thousands of years destabilized
  • ‘The climate is now warmer than at any time in last 5,000 years’www.theguardian.com/…
  • Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.

    A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia.

    “What we saw was amazing,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters. “It’s an indication that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more years.“www.theguardian.com/…

    With governments meeting in Bonn this week to try to ratchet up ambitions in United Nations climate negotiations, the team’s findings, published on 10 June in Geophysical Research Letters, offered a further sign of a growing climate emergency.

    The paper was based on data Romanovsky and his colleagues had been analysing since their last expedition to the area in 2016. The team used a modified propeller plane to visit exceptionally remote sites, including an abandoned cold war-era radar base more than 300km from the nearest human settlement.www.theguardian.com/…

    The end of the Arctic as we know it

    www.theguardian.com/…

    Stricken polar bear turns up in Siberian city, hundreds of miles from home

    • Visibly weak female bear spotted in Norilsk in northern Siberia
    • Climate emergency has damaged polar bears’ sea-ice habitatswww.theguardian.com/…
    • Even if current commitments to cut emissions under the 2015 Paris agreement are implemented, the world is still far from averting the risk that these kinds of feedback loops will trigger runaway warming, according to models used by the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

      With scientists warning that sharply higher temperatures would devastate the global south and threaten the viability of industrial civilisation in the northern hemisphere, campaigners said the new paper reinforced the imperative to cut emissions.www.theguardian.com/…