Behold, The Power Of Albedo - 2007 Fire Means Tundra Soil Temps Up 3.6 - 5.4F Over Unburned Areas

[hatrack]

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The fire that incinerated the land from July into September last year is the largest ever recorded on Alaskan tundra. It cleared a swath of 400 square miles far from civilization. It followed a pair of forest fires earlier in the decade that had ranked one and three on the list of largest on record in the state.

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One finding: It turns out looks do matter. "You can see that the surface is really dark," said Rocha, a researcher at the Marine Biological Laboratory. In fact, the ground is mostly coal-mine black rather than the vibrant green that blanketed the land before fire came. "More of the sun's energy is heating up the soil," he said. Just 3 percent of the light that strikes this ash-black ground is reflected back, compared with 18 percent on leafier, unburned ground.

Soil temperatures run 3.6 to 5.4 degrees hotter. And the ground thaw runs about 10 inches deeper than beneath unburned tundra - perhaps because it absorbs more sunlight, maybe because a layer of insulation against winter cold was stripped away, or both. The fire itself kicked massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the air. All wildfires do that. But even though the Arctic covers less than a sixth of the planet's land mass, it holds about one-third of the planet's stored carbon, in part because of the slow rate of decomposition in the previously frozen north.

With more of that soil taken out of the permafrost, the dirt is awakened to the activity of microbes that could release greater levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If the research going on here now finds that happening, the increase in Arctic fires could set in motion what scientists call positive feedback: greenhouse gases making for a hotter, drier Arctic that burns more often and kicks up even more greenhouse gases.

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http://www.kansascity.com/440/story/705665.html

[XemaSab]

1. Gelisols... mmm.

:9