Interior Alaska's Permafrost Within Two Degrees Of Melting - ADN

[hatrack]

FAIRBANKS -- Interior Alaska's permafrost has warmed in some places to the highest level since the ice age ended 10,000 years ago, its temperature now within a degree or two of thawing. Earth frozen since woolly mammoths and bison wandered Interior steppes has been turning to mush. Lakes have been shrinking. Trees are stressed. Prehistoric ice has melted underground, leaving voids that collapse into sinkholes.

Largely concentrated where people have disturbed the surface, such damage can be expensive, even heartbreaking. It's happening now in Fairbanks: Toppled spruce, roller-coaster bike trails, rippled pavement, homes and buildings that sag into ruin. And the meltdown is spreading in wild areas: sinkholes, dying trees, eroding lakes. These collapses bode ill: They are omens of what scientists fear will happen on a large scale across the Arctic if water and air continue to warm as fast as climate models predict.

"So far, we have only some local places where permafrost is thawing naturally," said expert Vladimir Romanovksy, a Russian-born geophysicist at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "But we are very, very close to this point when it (all) starts to thaw." After record high temperatures during the summer of 2004 and last winter's deep insulating snow, Romanovsky said he expects Interior permafrost will again be significantly warmer than normal this year -- still closer to melting.

EDIT

For a glimpse of that future, look no farther than the hills north of Fairbanks, near where Romanovsky lives with his wife and two of his three sons. In a meadow on his mother-in-law's property, weird six-foot-deep channels and holes crisscross the ground, trenches and bomb pits from what amounts to thermal warfare. A small hole opened up in the sod a few years ago, curving down into the earth like some gopher den. This spring, his sons and other children playing near the house discovered the bottom had fallen out. The cavity was now large enough to bury a person. No one has crawled down to see where it ends. Romanovksy discourages his sons playing in the field. "It is not safe," he said.

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http://www.adn.com/news/environment/story/6815494p-6707211c.html

[Dogmudgeon]

1. And I thought LAST year was hot for the Arctic

This year looks to be a couple of degrees warmer.

I actually suspect that a lot of that permafrost has begun to melt. If it melts and refreezes every 24 hours from now until the hard freeze comes in in October, the deep soil will become honeycombed with air pockets.

Next year, the warming will penetrate much more quickly, and microbial metabolism will be much more robust. Alaska, Siberia, and other tundras will become vast, soggy, stinking bogs, making "snap, crackle, and pop" sounds, breeding insects in sky-blackening numbers, and emitting methane and carbon dioxide in in mind-blowing amounts. Which will provide positive feedback to the warming cycle.

Both Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger climate events are preceeded by enormous temperature spikes. I think we may be in one such spike now.

--p!

[hatrack]

2. It's getting really bad up there

My brother's lived there for 30 years, and he says frost-heaving and thermokarsting gets worse every year. Not so much where he is, luckily, but it's getting really messy around Fairbanks - and pretty much anywhere else in the interior.

And it's just getting going now.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. The world's largest temperature inversion

I wonder if anyone has thought of that, and of the consequences of several years of temperature inversions over the North Pole.

It's warmer at the pole now than at 70N latitude. I suppose that there is an enormous high-pressure bubble over the Arctic as well. This will tend to trap the greenhouse gasses and concentrate them, making the Arctic tropical in the summertime. I'd keep my eyes peeled for formation of tropic storms in the Arctic, possibly as early as this year.

In the autumn, when the amount of sunlight is reduced, the bubble will dissipate, but at some point the inversion will become strong enough that it will "burst". A huge bubble of warm, tropical air breaking into a surrounding environment of frigid cold is a recipe for massive storms and blizzards. So, if I'm correct, we should see increasingly intense early-season snowstorms in Canada, Russia, and Europe.

If the air inversion becomes self-sustaining, then the storms could be generated all winter, at a pace to keep a rough balance in the atmosphere. It would also drive an increasing see-saw of temperature changes in the winter and springtime, with alternating heat waves and freeze-ins at high middle latitudes.

Then, I would rue the day that the oceanic thermohaline current finally gets washed out. At that point, a superblizzard scenario -- milder than the one in The Day After Tomorrow, but still epochal -- becomes possible. It could take months for the dome of tropical air to dissipate, and it would carry an enormous amount of water.

I doubt that the northern hemisphere jet stream would stay intact during these episodes. They are probably conducive to pole-straddling "wave 2" storms, like the "superstorm" of March 10-14, 1993, which was an east-coast blizzard. And a blizzard in Poland. And floods in Mexico ... and Iran. I've wondered if the temperature swings caused by the explosion at Pinatubo had anything to do with that.

And what's been going on in north Sweden, Finland, and in Russia? Scandinavians build their houses too well to notice much of this yet; and the Russians just won't speak of it.

Then, too, at 1% methane per volume in the air, gasoline engines and people start to die; could this happen in polar locales, low spots and valleys, after a hard summer of microbial activity? Will we see whole villages of people knocked dead in the middle of the night, when cooler weather increases localized methane concentrations to 1.5 or 2%?

Yep, this is all just a series of semi-educated guesses on my part; maybe the adult equivalent of a scary campfire story told on a hot summer's night. I figured that a polar air inversion would happen, but I'm surprised just how big it's gotten in so little time. Four years ago, the warm summer wasn't too much worse than other warm summers.

But as I've been finding out, the permafrost changes have been going on since the middle 1990s, only nobody thought that they were all that unusual every couple of decades. Then, houses started sinking about five years ago. The Arctic has had warm weather before. But nothing like this, at least since the Younger-Dryas.

How much longer? Twenty more summers? Ten? Five? I have no doubt that the Earth can deal with these minor ripples; it's the Earth's creatures that bear the brunt. And we may be in line to get brunted very soon.

Well, kids, enjoy the marshmallows!

--p!