It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Global heating is enabling increased human activity in the Earth’s northernmost reaches, as melting sea ice opens up shipping and industrial possibilities, including mining deep into the permafrost which covers a fifth of the northern hemisphere, mainly in Canada, Siberia and Alaska.
But scientists have reportedly started to plan an Arctic monitoring network to watch out for any early cases of a disease sparked by ancient viruses, also known as Methusela microbes. A cemetery sits on melting permafrost tundra at the Yupik Eskimo village of Quinhagak in Alaska (Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images)
But the scientist fear viruses capable of infecting humans likely also lurk in the permafrost. “We see the traces of many, many, many other viruses,” Professor Claverie told CNN in March, adding: “If the amoeba viruses are still alive, there is no reason why the other viruses will not be still alive, and capable of infecting their own hosts.”
As a result, Prof Claverie is among scientists working with the University of the Arctic network on plans to establish quarantine facilities and provide medical expertise that could pinpoint and attempt to treat any early cases without them leaving the region, according to The Observer.
“At the moment, analyses of pandemic threats focus on diseases that might emerge in southern regions and then spread north,” Prof Claverie, of Aix-Marseille University in France, told the paper. “By contrast, little attention has been given to an outbreak that might emerge in the far north and then travel south – and that is an oversight, I believe.
“There are viruses up there that have the potential to infect humans and start a new disease outbreak.” Among the genomic traces of human pathogens identified already by the team in Siberian permafrost are pox viruses and herpes viruses, he said. According to scientists, Alaska has been warming twice as fast as the global average (Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images)
Virologist Marion Koopmans agreed, telling the paper: “We don’t know what viruses are lying out there in the permafrost but I think there is a real risk that there might be one capable of triggering a disease outbreak – say of an ancient form of polio. We have to assume that something like this could happen.”
With forecasts suggesting the Arctic Sea will be ice-free as early as 2040 due to climate breakdown, it is the prospect of increased human activity in the Arctic, as opposed to melting permafrost, which most concerns Prof Claverie.
“Huge mining operations are being planned, and are going to drive vast holes into the deep permafrost to extract oil and ores,” he said. “Those operations will release vast amounts of pathogens that still thrive there. Miners will walk in and breath the viruses. The effects could be calamitous.”
“Our immune systems may have never been in contact with some of those microbes, and that is another worry,” said Prof Claverie. “The scenario of an unknown virus once infecting a Neanderthal coming back at us, although unlikely, has become a real possibility.”
Prof Koopmans added: “If you look at the history of epidemic outbreaks, one of the key drivers has been change in land use. Nipah virus was spread by fruit bats who were driven from their habitats by humans. Similarly, monkeypox has been linked to the spread of urbanisation in Africa.
“And that is what we are about to witness in the Arctic: a complete change in land use, and that could be dangerous, as we have seen elsewhere.”
Permafrost in Canada, Alaska and Siberia is abruptly crumbling in ways that could release large stores of greenhouse gases more quickly than anticipated, researchers have warned.
Scientists have long fretted that climate change - which has heated Arctic and subarctic regions at double the global rate - will release planet-warming CO2 and methane that has remained safely locked inside Earth's frozen landscapes for millennia.
It was assumed this process would be gradual, leaving humanity time to draw down carbon emissions enough to prevent permafrost thaw from tipping into a self-perpetuating vicious circle of ice melt and global warming.
But a study published on Monday in Nature Geoscience says projections of how much carbon would be released by this kind of slow-and-steady thawing overlook a less well-known process whereby certain types of icy terrain disintegrate suddenly - sometimes within days.
"Although abrupt permafrost thawing will occur in less than 20 percent of frozen land, it increases permafrost carbon release projections by about 50 percent," said lead author Merritt Turetsky, head of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research in Boulder, Colorado.
"Under all future warming scenarios, abrupt thaw leads to net carbon losses into the atmosphere," she told AFP.
Permafrost contains rocks, soil, sand and pockets of pure ground ice. Its rich carbon content is the remains of life that once flourished in the Arctic, including plants, animals and microbes.
This matter - which never fully decomposed - has been frozen for thousands of years.
It stretches across an area nearly as big as Canada and the United States combined, and holds about 1,500 billion tonnes or carbon - twice as much as in the atmosphere and three times the amount humanity has emitted since the start of industrialisation.
Some of this once rock-solid ground has begun to soften, upending indigenous communities and threatening industrial infrastructure across the sub-Arctic region, especially in Russia.
The evidence is mixed as to whether this not-so-permanent permafrost has started to vent significant quantities of methane or CO2. projections are also uncertain, with some scientists saying future emissions may be at least partially offset by new vegetation, which absorbs and stores CO2.
But there is no doubt, experts say, that permafrost will continue to give way as temperatures climb.
If humanity manages - against all odds - to cap global warming at under 2°C, the cornerstone goal of the 2015 Paris climate treaty, "permafrost area shows a decrease of 24 percent by 2100", it concluded.
At the other extreme, if fossil fuel emissions continue to grow over the next 50 years - arguably an equally unlikely prospect - up to 70 percent of permafrost could disappear, the IPPC said.
But both scenarios assume the loss will be gradual, and that may be a mistake, Turetsky suggested.
"We estimate that abrupt permafrost thawing - in lowland lakes and wetlands, together with that in upland hills - could release 60 to 100 billion tonnes of carbon by 2300," she and colleagues noted in a 2019 comment also published by Nature.
One tonne of carbon is equivalent to 3.67 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), which means this would be equivalent to about eight years of global emissions at current rates.
"This is in addition to the 200 billion tonnes of carbon expected to be released in other regions that will thaw gradually," she said.
Current climate models do not account for the possibility of rapid permafrost collapse and the amount of gases it might release, the study notes.
Abrupt thawing is "fast and dramatic", Merritt said, adding: "Forests can become lakes in the course of a month, landslides can occur with no warning, and invisible methane seep holes can swallow snowmobiles whole."
Arctic sinkholes open in a flash after permafrost melt
Some permafrost zones thaw faster than expected and are reshaping the Arctic landscape. By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer Trees struggle to remain upright in a lake formed by abrupt
Arctic permafrost can thaw so quickly that it triggers landslides, drowns forests and opens gaping sinkholes. This rapid melt, described in a new study, can dramatically reshape the Arctic landscape in just a few months.
Fast-melting permafrost is also more widespread than once thought. About 20% of the Arctic's permafrost — a blend of frozen sand, soil and rocks — also has a high volume of ground ice, making it vulnerable to rapid thawing. When the ice that binds the rocky material melts away, it leaves behind a marshy, eroded land surface known as thermokarst.
Previous climate models overlooked this kind of surface in estimating Arctic permafrost loss, researchers reported. That oversight likely skewed predictions of how much sequestered carbon could be released by melting permafrost, and new estimates suggest that permafrost could pump twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as scientists formerly estimated, the study found.
Frozen water takes up more space than liquid water, so when ice-rich permafrost thaws rapidly — "due to climate change or wildfire or other disturbance" — it transforms a formerly frozen Arctic ecosystem into a flooded, "soupy mess," prone to floods and soil collapse, said lead study author Merritt Turetsky, director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado Boulder.
"This can happen very quickly, causing relatively dry and solid ecosystems (such as forests) to turn into lakes in the matter of months to years," and the effects can extend into the soil to a depth of several meters, Turetsky told Live Science in an email.
By comparison, "gradual thaw slowly affects soil by centimeters over decades," Turetsky said.
Creating feedback
Across the Arctic, long-frozen permafrost is melting as climate change drives global temperatures higher. Permafrost represents about 15% of Earth's soil, but it holds about 60% of the planet's soil-stored carbon: approximately 1.5 trillion tons (1.4 trillion metric tons) of carbon, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
When permafrost thaws, it releases stored carbon into the atmosphere. This release can then speed up global warming; this cycle is known as climate feedback, the scientists wrote in the study.
Aerial image of a permafrost peatland in Alaska's Innoko National Wildlife Refuge, interspersed with smaller areas of thermokarst wetlands. (Image credit: Miriam Jones, U.S. Geological Survey)
In fact, carbon emissions from about 965,000 square miles (2.5 million square kilometers) of quick-thawed thermokarst could provide climate feedback similar to emissions produced by nearly 7 million square miles (18 million square km) of permafrost that thawed gradually, the researchers reported.
And yet, rapid thawing from permafrost is "not represented in any existing global model," study co-author David Lawrence, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said in a statement.
Abrupt permafrost thaw was likely excluded from prior emissions models because it represents such a small percentage of the Arctic's land surface, Turetsky explained.
"Our study proves that models need to account for both types of permafrost thaw — both slow and steady change as well as abrupt thermokarst — if the goal is to quantify climate feedbacks in the Arctic," Turetsky added.
The findings were published online Feb. 3 in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Permafrost is present above 2,500 metres. Melting permafrost was the cause of a landslide on the Matterhorn (pictured), at Zermatt in southern Switzerland, in summer 2003.
Keystone / Alessandro Della Bella
Switzerland is a pioneering country in the study of permafrost. The thawing of terrain that used to be permanently frozen is becoming more and more prevalent, and it has planet-wide repercussions.
This content was published on November 10, 2020 -
The locals call it "Hell’s Gate" because of the noises that seem to come from the bowels of the earth. For scientists, the Batagaika crater, in Eastern Siberia, has nothing very diabolical about it. The sounds it makes are the result of a geophysical phenomenon that has been known for quite some time: the melting of permafrost, the layer of permanently frozen ground.
This change, driven by global warming, is happening not just on the Siberian tundra, but throughout a northern hemisphere area of about 23 million square km, or twice the size of the US. Found mainly in the Arctic regions, from Russia to Canada, permafrost is also present in the high mountain terrain right across the Alps. In Switzerland, it is found above an altitude of 2,500 metres.
As well as causing major disturbances to the terrain itself, thawing of permafrost can undermine the stability of mountain slopes and trigger natural disasters. These developments are a worry to people living in the affected regions, but the potential repercussions around the world are also a major cause of concern. According to a 2019 report by the United Nations, the loss of permafrost is one of five major threats to the environment that have hitherto been underestimated.
Permafrost warms up
Some 5% of Switzerland’s national territory is made up of permafrost, mostly in terrain covered by rock debris and on cliff walls at high altitudes. In comparison, the proportion covered by glaciers is about 2.5%.
"It is clear that in the past twenty years, the temperature of permafrost has been rising throughout the Swiss Alps", says Jeannette Noetzli of the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research.
It’s not just the temperature of the surrounding air that determines the condition of the permafrost, she points out. The sun’s rays and the snow cover have to be taken into account as well.
Unlike peaks above the 4,000-metre level and the polar regions, where permafrost is really cold, in Alpine regions most of its temperature is close to zero, Noetzli explains. "So we have less of a thermic 'reserve' and we are that much closer to melting point."
What is known as the “active layer” is getting thicker. This is the top level of the permafrost which melts during the summer and freezes again in the winter. External Content
Sensors and cameras on the Matterhorn
Jeannette Noetzli heads PERMOS, the permafrost monitoring network in Switzerland. Created in 2000, it is the first national network dedicated to studying change in permafrost. Switzerland has the world’s largest collection of data on high-altitude permafrost, and it includes a chronological series covering a period of over 30 years.
Researchers are able to make use of advanced technologies: probes that go down a hundred metres, devices to measure the terrain’s electrical resistance, GPS, wireless sensors and high-resolution video cameras. On the Hörnli ridge of the Matterhorn, 3,500 metres up, a network of 17 sensors is transmitting data in real time to the computing centre at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (this is the PermaSense project).
Replacement of a temperature-measuring device above the Corvatsch-Murtèl glacier in canton Graubünden in southeast Switzerland. Jeannette Noetzli, PERMOS
Risk of landslides
The unfreezing of the permafrost has a negative impact on the stability of mountainsides, because it takes away their “stickiness”, as Cécile Pellet of the geosciences department at the University of Fribourg explains.
"Losing the permafrost can lead to rockslides", she told the Valais newspaper Le Nouvelliste. However, as the PERMOS researcher points out, there can be more than one reason when this kind of event happens, as was the case in Bondo in 2017. The geology of the place itself may be a contributing factor.
It would be too much of a generalisation to say that the Alps are going to become a more dangerous place due to global warming and the melting of permafrost, thinks Noetzli. "But we are noticing major changes in sensitive areas. As a result, mountain climbers may have to look for different routes to take in some places".
Danger for tourist infrastructure
One thing is certain, however: the decline of the permafrost and the increasing movement seen in rock debris has the potential to be a problem for buildings and structures of all kinds sited at a high altitude: chalets for mountain-climbers, cableways, railways, telecommunications equipment, avalanche barriers, and so on.
All this infrastructure is important for tourism, communication, power supply, and prevention of natural hazards in Switzerland. For example, the Gornergrat railway near the Matterhorn and the Jungfrau railway in the Bernese Alps were built partly over permafrost.
Cable-car operators will need to invest in new construction to strengthen the pillars supporting their infrastructure. In canton Uri, for exmaple, a new concrete base has had to be put in for the Gemsstock cable car line, which goes up to an altitude of almost 3,000 metres. Worrying global trends
The repercussions of the thawing of permafrost will be seen not just at local or regional level.
As the permafrost melts, ancient microorganisms trapped inside the ice could get out into the atmosphere and become reactivated, infecting humans and animals. To learn more, see our article on this topic featuring Swiss expert Beat Frey, who is a researcher at the Snow and Avalanche Institute studying Alpine permafrost. He calls this issue "a major unknown".
Furthermore, organic carbon which has accumulated over the course of millennia in the ice layer will increasingly find itself being released into the atmosphere in the form of CO2 and methane, which is likely to add to global warming – a vicious circle.
This issue concerns above all the Arctic regions, where rising temperatures (two to four times the global average) are bringing the collapse of the permafrost that much closer, experts warn. According to the estimates, frozen terrain holds about 1,600 billion metric tons of carbon – double what is in the atmosphere.
Tuesday, May 18, 2021
More than 60% of Russian territory is permafrost. Now it is melting
Climate change is about to dramatically change the Russian North. The country is now starting the building of a new permafrost monitoring system.
Russian authorities have made the Arctic a top priority and big sums are invested in new regional industry and infrastructure.
But the melting of the permafrost could potentially stagger plans. Across the country’s north, buildings, roads and industrial installations are slowly sliding into the ground.
Decision makers in Moscow now increasingly see the permafrost melting as an issue of concern, and measures are taken to step up mapping.
According to Minister of Natural Resources Aleksandr Kozlov, a state monitoring system for the permafrost will be established, and this system will be anchored in federal legislation.
“65 percent of Russia’s territory is located in the permafrost zone, but this is not mentioned in a single federal program document, despite the fact that the permafrost area is a vital component in the natural environment, of which the landscape, vegetation and coastline is dependent,” Kozlov says in a statement.
The melting already has major consequences for people living in the region, he explains.
“We see how the melting of the permafrost is triggering accidents at industrial and housing objects, therefore it is obvious that the state needs a system for monitoring and early-warning of negative consequences of the degradation of the permafrost,” he underlines.
“We have to protect the nature from environmental catastophe,” he says.
The new monitoring system will be based on existing research installations managed by state meteorological authority Roshydromet, and two development phases are envisaged.
The first pilot phase will cover the period 2022-2024 and be based on experiences and methodology applied in Spitsbergen, Franz Josef Land and Severnaya Zemlya, the Ministry of Natural Resources informs.
In addition to the federal monitoring system come several regional initiatives. In the Yamal-Nenets region, a laboratory for permafrost studies will this year be opened.
The lab is developed on an initiative from governor Dmitry Artyukhov, the regional government informs. It is believed to be the first of its kind in Russia.
“Climate change and the melting of the permafrost is a huge challenge not only to Yamal, but to the whole of Russia,” Artyukhov says.
Wednesday, March 16, 2022
First-of-its-kind research reveals rapid changes to the Arctic seafloor as submerged permafrost thaws
A new study from MBARI researchers and their collaborators is the first to document how the thawing of permafrost, submerged underwater at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, is affecting the seafloor. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on March 14, 2022.
Numerous peer-reviewed studies show that thawing permafrost creates unstable land which negatively impacts important Arctic infrastructure, such as roads, train tracks, buildings, and airports. This infrastructure is expensive to repair, and the impacts and costs are expected to continue increasing.
Using advanced underwater mapping technology, MBARI researchers and their collaborators revealed that dramatic changes are happening to the seafloor as a result of thawing permafrost. In some areas, deep sinkholes have formed, some larger than a city block of six-story buildings. In other areas, ice-filled hills called pingos have risen from the seafloor.
"We know that big changes are happening across the Arctic landscape, but this is the first time we've been able to deploy technology to see that changes are happening offshore too," said Charlie Paull, a geologist at MBARI and one of the lead authors of the study. "This groundbreaking research has revealed how the thawing of submarine permafrost can be detected, and then monitored once baselines are established."
While the degradation of terrestrial Arctic permafrost is attributed in part to increases in mean annual temperature from human-driven climate change, the changes the research team has documented on the seafloor associated with submarine permafrost derive from much older, slower climatic shifts related to our emergence from the last ice age. Similar changes appear to have been happening along the seaward edge of the former permafrost for thousands of years.
"There isn't a lot of long-term data for the seafloor temperature in this region, but the data we do have aren't showing a warming trend. The changes to seafloor terrain are instead being driven by heat carried in slowly moving groundwater systems," explained Paull.
"This research was made possible through international collaboration over the past decade that has provided access to modern marine research platforms such as MBARI's autonomous robotic technology and icebreakers operated by the Canadian Coast Guard and the Korean Polar Research Institute," said Scott Dallimore, a research scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada, Natural Resources Canada, who led the study with Paull. "The Government of Canada and the Inuvialuit people who live on the coast of the Beaufort Sea highly value this research as the complex processes described have implications for the assessment of geohazards, creation of unique marine habitat, and our understanding of biogeochemical processes."
Background
The Canadian Beaufort Sea, a remote area of the Arctic, has only recently become accessible to scientists as climate change drives the retreat of sea ice.
Since 2003, MBARI has been part of an international collaboration to study the seafloor of the Canadian Beaufort Sea with the Geological Survey of Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and since 2013, with the Korean Polar Research Institute.
MBARI used autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and ship-based sonar to map the bathymetry of the seafloor down to a resolution of a one-meter square grid, or roughly the size of a dinner table.
Paull and the team of researchers will return to the Arctic this summer aboard the R/V Araon, a Korean icebreaker. This trip with MBARI's long-time Canadian and Korean collaborators—along with the addition of the United States Naval Research Laboratory—will help refine our understanding of the decay of submarine permafrost.
More information:Rapid seafloor changes associated with the degradation of Arctic submarine permafrost,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(2022).DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2119105119
Submarine surveys of the seafloor beneath the Arctic Ocean have revealed deep craters appearing off the Canadian coastline. The scientists involved attribute these to gasses released as permafrost melts. The causes, so far, lie long before humans started messing with the planet’s thermostat, but that could be about to change.
For millions of years, soil has been frozen solid over large areas of the planet, both on land and under the ocean, even where snow melts at the surface to leave no permanent ice sheet. Known as permafrost, this frozen layer traps billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and methane. It is thought the sudden melting of similar areas around 55 million years ago set off the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when temperatures rose sharply over the space of a few thousand years.
Dr Charles Paull of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and co-authors ran four surveys of the storied Beaufort Sea between 2010 and 2019 using autonomous underwater vehicles assisted by icebreakers at the surface. They restricted their observations to depths between 120 and 150 meters (400-500 feet) as in most places this captures the permafrost's outer margin.
The paper reports numerous steep-sided depressions up to 28 meters (92 feet), along with ice-filled hills up to 100 meters (330 feet) wide known as pingos. Some of these, including a deep depression 225 meters (738 feet) long and 95 meters (312 feet) across, appeared between successive surveys, rather than being long-standing features. Others expanded in the time the team were watching.
The depressions are the result of groundwater ascending up the continental slope. Sometimes the groundwater freezes from contact with colder material, causing the ground surface to heave upwards and produce pingos.
“We know that big changes are happening across the Arctic landscape, but this is the first time we’ve been able to deploy technology to see that changes are happening offshore too,” Paull said in a statement. “This groundbreaking research has revealed how the thawing of submarine permafrost can be detected, and then monitored once baselines are established.”
The research was possible because the Beaufort Sea, once too icebound for research like this, is melting fast. That trend is, the authors agree, a consequence of human emissions of Greenhouse gases. The same goes for the widespread disappearance of permafrost on land.
However, the extra heat those gasses put into the global system has yet to penetrate to the depths Paull and co-authors were studying. Here, temperatures operate on a much slower cycle, buffered by so much water, and are still responding to the warming that took place as the last glacial era ended. At the current rate, it would take more than a thousand years to produce the topography the team observed.
“There isn’t a lot of long-term data for the seafloor temperature in this region, but the data we do have aren’t showing a warming trend,” Paull said. “The changes to seafloor terrain are instead being driven by heat carried in slowly moving groundwater systems.”
The natural melting of Ice Age permafrost releases gasses that warm the planet, part of a reinforcing interglacial era cycle, but the effect is slow enough to present little problem for humans or other species. As human-induced atmospheric heat permeates the oceans at these levels things could accelerate dramatically, and the authors see their work as establishing a baseline so we know if that occurs.
Giant, 90ft Deep Craters Are Appearing on the Arctic Seafloor
Enormous craters measuring 90 feet in depth have appeared on the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean.
The craters, scientists say, are forming as a result of thawing submerged permafrost on the edge of the Beaufort Sea in northern Canada, with retreating glaciers from the last ice age driving the change and not recent climate warming.
As the soil thaws, organic matter trapped within starts to break down, causing the release of methane and other greenhouse gasses. As these gasses are released, pressure builds.
On land, the impact is clear. In Siberia, there is footage showing the land wobbling "like jelly" beneath people's feet.
What happens when permafrost on the bottom of the sea thaws is less clear, however.
In 2019, scientists in Siberia discovered a patch of ocean where the sea was "boiling" with methane, with concentrations of the gas around seven times higher than the global average.
Two years earlier, a different team of researchers found evidence of huge craters—some over 3,000 feet wide—on the floor of the Barents Sea, north of Norway and Russia. They said these craters had formed as a result of methane explosions that took place thousands of years earlier
. To better understand what impact thawing permafrost is having beneath the ocean, researchers led by Charles K. Paull, a senior scientist at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, used advanced mapping technology to observe changes to the seafloor over the course of a decade.
They conducted surveys in the Beaufort Sea between 2010 and 2019 to map topographical changes resulting from thawing permafrost.
Findings showed that at depths between around 400 and 500 feet, huge depressions with steep sides were forming. The largest was 90 feet deep. Their findings are published in scientific journal PNAS.
Paull told Newsweek they were shocked at their findings, with the craters far larger than they had anticipated.
He said the team does not believe the craters formed in explosive events: "The evidence suggests that the submarine features we observed forming are essentially sink-holes and retreating scarps, collapsing into void space left behind by the thawing of ice-rich permafrost."
Unlike terrestrial permafrost, climate change is not driving the seafloor to thaw. Instead, the shift is the result of older climatic shifts relating to the end of the last ice age, around 11,700 years ago. Heat is being carried to the permafrost via slow-moving groundwater systems.
The team plans to return to the Arctic this summer to look more closely at the decaying seafloor permafrost.
Julian Murton, Professor of Permafrost Science at the U.K.'s University of Sussex, who was not involved in the study, told Newsweek he was surprised at how quickly the seafloor topography had changed.
"Some changes are as rapid or even more rapid than the better-known landsurface topographic changes driven by thaw of ice-rich permafrost in the Arctic," he said. "I had assumed that thermal inertia associated with thick relict permafrost and with overlying seawater led to slow changes in seafloor topography.
"Clearly this assumption is shown to be wrong, at least locally, by this fascinating, high-resolution study."
Paull said the longer term consequences of seafloor permafrost thaw is unclear: "Since some methane is trapped in permafrost, thawing permafrost inevitably releases methane, an important greenhouse gas," he said.
"However, we don't have data to understand whether the rate of methane release from decaying submarine permafrost has changed in recent times in this area.
"The changes we've documented derive from much older, slower climatic shifts related to Earth's emergence from the last ice age, and appear to have been happening along the edge of the permafrost for thousands of years. Whether anthropogenic climate change will accelerate the process remains unknown."
Researchers observed huge sinkholes appearing on the ocean floor over a nine-year survey
There’s a subterranean menace stalking the highway outside of Whitehorse.
It is implacable, remorseless and, unless drastic measures are taken, inevitable.
If and when it reaches the Alaska Highway, many of the Yukon’s northern communities will be cut off from Whitehorse, as will that city’s only connection to neighbouring Alaska.
That’s why Fabrice Calmels, research chair in permafrost and geoscience at Yukon University, has dotted the area around it with sensors. He hopes to be able to give governments an early warning of the menace long before the ground begins to heave beneath their feet.
The menace is called a permafrost slump. It occurs when the permanently frozen layer of soil that underlies large swaths of Canada north of the 60th parallel begins to thaw.
When that layer contains a lot of water in the form of ice — in Canada, it most often does — and that ice thaws, the ground can often no longer support the weight on top of it.
When that happens, it can cause roads to sag or buckle. It can even cause sinkholes to open up in the middle of a roadway.
And, when the slumps happen, there is often a chain reaction — more permafrost is exposed to the air, accelerating the thawing, and the slumping becomes a runaway process.
To be fair, the menace, located about 34 kilometres west of Whitehorse airport by road, is more of a tortoise than a hare.
It has moved 69 metres over the past five years, and it now sits 37 metres from the road. But it’s picked up the pace recently. Over the past summer — fuelled in part by a two-week spell of above 30 C weather — it has moved a whopping 18 metres.
If it continues at its current average pace — which is not a given — it will cross paths with the highway in two or three years. Yukon’s Department of Highways and Public Works is already looking at ways to mitigate the problem.
They’re considering everything from detouring the highway to finding ways to keep the permafrost cool to digging down to replace and stabilize the ground below the highway.
The problem, says Idrees Muhammad, manager of design and construction for the department, is that all those options are expensive, part of the cost of trying to build on permafrost.
Calmels’ sensors are the first stage of an early-warning system for permafrost slump, which he is developing in collaboration with his mentor, Michel Allard, professor emeritus at Laval University, who has similar sensors installed at three airports in remote Nunavik communities in northern Quebec for the same purpose.
“Permafrost touches everything,” says Calmels. “It’s always been difficult to build on permafrost.”
Everything that is built upon permafrost today incorporates measures designed to minimize the impact of that layer becoming unstable. Houses built on permafrost are built above the ground to allow air to pass below them, to keep the permafrost frozen. Roads cost five times more to build and maintain on permafrost than on non-permafrost ground because they must compensate for the possible movement of the ground due to changes in the permafrost layer.
But most of that technology is based on a relatively stable climate, says Calmels, one where there is a thermal equilibrium between the infrastructure, the air temperature and the permafrost temperature.
“But if our (global) temperature is rising, then it becomes a lot more difficult.”
When the warning system is finished, the scientists hope they will be able to automatically analyze the data coming from those sensors, predict if the thawing permafrost might cause a slump that could threaten those sites, and automatically send an alarm to those who need to know about such things.
Those warnings would come at two levels, says Calmels. The first, detecting smaller movements and temperature changes in the permafrost, would warn officials that there was a likelihood of a slump occurring in the near future. The second level, a massive movement or the loss of a sensor, would indicate that a slump — or a sinkhole — had just occurred, giving officials a chance to shut down any affected roads.
Calmels’ sensors, some deployed in boreholes drilled into the permafrost, each hour measure ground temperature at various depths, air temperature, soil moisture and precipitation.
They also include inclinometers, which can be used to produce information about whether the ground is moving, how much and how fast it’s moving and about its movement relative to other layers.
His team also surveys the slump from the air, using GPS markers and a drone to track its movement.
All the data goes into a data logger, which then sends the information to a nearby substation called a gateway. In the case of the Alaska Highway slump, that gateway is at a farmer’s place about a kilometre away.
From the gateway, the information is uploaded via the internet to a central computer at Laval University in Quebec City. There, an algorithm — now in the final stages of development — analyzes the raw data and determines if there’s a danger of an upheaval occurring in the near future.
There’s evidence this system works. During the past year, Calmels put sensors directly in front of the Alaska Highway slump, and, using the data he collected, was able to predict the next portion of the slump six days before it actually happened.
Eventually, the whole system will be automated, and if the algorithm determines an alarm should be raised, it will be sent out automatically via an email distribution list to whoever needs to know.
The project, funded in part by both the federal and territorial governments, is being undertaken in collaboration with Laval University.
In Quebec, Laval’s Allard has placed similar sensors near the airports of three Nunavik communities — Salluit, Tasiujaq and Inukjuak — to keep an eye on whether any permafrost changes might lead to buckling runways.
Here, Allard is also concerned about thawing permafrost creating landslides, a similar process to the slumps in Yukon, but occurring on more of a slope.
When the permafrost layer thaws, the layer of ground on top of it, the active layer, which perennially freezes and rethaws, may be cut loose and start to slide. Scientist call that an “active layer detachment failure.”
“The idea is: how can we assess the risk that a landslide will occur in the future?” he says. “By what method can we make a warning system that will tell, for example, the mayor, the civil security organizations that, if the weather continues as it is going on now, the risk of landslides will be starting.”
Those kinds of warnings are vitally important in Quebec’s far North. There are 14 Inuit communities in Nunavik, all of which depend solely on their airports for supplies once the seasons change and ice closes off shipping access.
Once Allard and Calmels’ warning system is up and running, the three airports will have a little advance notice of changes in the permafrost that might affect airport runways. Allard says he’s already been talking with the government about expanding that warning system to the other 11 communities.
And it’s not a stretch to believe that the early warning system they’ve developed can be adapted to other, non-permafrost areas.
For example, given enough study, the network of sensors and the automated warning system could be applied to slopes in B.C., warning officials there when a mudslide or rock slide might be imminent, and sending off a widespread alarm when one has. That’s a warning that might have been useful during last week’s flooding and mudslides in southern B.C. that killed at least one person and trapped hundreds of people on its highways.
“This is not so complex, you know,” says Allard. “The key system is the data logger and the (local) communication. And those systems are widely available, and they can be deployed to anywhere in the world.
“So, if some specialist in landslides wants to send a signal, the system can be installed on their instrumentation and be put to use.”
Allard expects the automated warning system will be up and running by next summer.
Thawing permafrost isn’t just a problem for the Arctic. Here’s how it can impact the globe
There’s a reason scientists and climate change activists have been raising the alarm about the planet’s melting permafrost for the better part of the last decade.
That’s because as climate change causes an overall rise in global average temperatures, the consequent thawing of that perpetually frozen layer of earth in the Arctic has the potentially to drastically change people’s way of life, not only in the north, but across the globe.
At the local level, thawing permafrost has impacts on the way people — and animals — hunt, fish and otherwise gather food. It has further-reaching impacts on any man-made infrastructure built on it, which has consequential effects on access between communities in a region where those communities tend to be widely dispersed.
And thawing permafrost has impacts on a global level, where the process can contribute to the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which will, in a feedback loop, further speed the increase in global average temperature, thus causing more permafrost thaw.
Permafrost, by definition, is any type of ground that stays at or below 0 C for two or more consecutive years. In Canada, most of that permafrost contains water in the form of ice.
In practice, much of the permafrost that occurs in the world — predominantly north of 60 degrees latitude — has remained frozen for thousands of years. That includes great swaths of Canada, Greenland, Siberia and Alaska.
In those regions, there is a layer of ground at the surface that repeatedly thaws and refreezes as the seasons change. Scientists call this the active layer. Usually, it ranges from 0.5 to 2 metres thick, with the thinner active layers occurring in far northern regions, while the thicker layers occur near the southern boundaries of permafrost.
Underneath that active layer lies the permanently frozen permafrost layer. In regions where the temperatures are consistently cold, such as Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic, that layer can be 700 metres thick. Further south, as in Yellowknife, it becomes only a few metres thick.
At the interface of the two layers, the permafrost tends to contain a lot of water in the form of ice. This is significant because when ice-rich permafrost begins to melt, it undermines the stability of the ground above it.
When that happens, you may get sinkholes, you may get slumps in the earth, and in the cases where the ground is sloped, you may get landslides. Or, as the scientists dub it, an “active layer detachment failure.”
To a large extent, the thawing of a permafrost layer depends on two things: temperature and precipitation.
“If you have a warm winter where the winter is not cold enough to cool off the permafrost, it’s relatively bad. If you have a hot summer, it’s not good news either,” says Fabrice Calmels, the research chair for Permafrost and Geoscience at Yukon University.
“If you have a lot of snow in winter, it means that you will have a layer that insulates the cold air from the permafrost. So, it keeps the permafrost warmer because you put a blanket on it. So, a lot of snow is not good.”
If there’s rain, says Calmels, that’s not good for the permafrost either, because the warmer water will infiltrate the soil, move through its active layer and warm the permafrost beneath.
When that happens, things on the surface become disturbed.
The change in topology may be quite dramatic.
Old Crow in the Yukon is 800 km north of Whitehorse — a three-hour flight by plane, the only way to get there.
For generations, Zelma Lake, near Old Crow, has been a focal point of hunting and fishing for the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation.
But in 2007, that lake suddenly, catastrophically, drained — the result, in part, say scientists, of melting permafrost opening up cavities under the lake.
That’s an extreme example. There are less sensational ones that may have wide-ranging long-term consequences.
Lakes turn into grasslands or ponds. Traditional trapping trails become inaccessible. Berries and medicinal plants aren’t able to grow where they used to.
In the same area around Old Crow, says Calmels, permafrost thawing has led to changes in the forest above. And as the forest degrades, a species of lichen that’s attached to that forest becomes more rare. And that particular lichen is a favourite food of the caribou. If the rarity of the lichen becomes widespread, it potentially means the caribou change their migration paths, meaning those who hunt the caribou will have to change along with them.
In areas where humans have built infrastructure on top of permafrost, the thawing of that layer often means upheaval of the ground above. And that means roads may become impassable — even developing sinkholes — and airport runways may become unusable.
And that’s especially problematic north of 60 where remote communities depend on those roads and airports for all their supplies.
Just outside Whitehorse, Calmels is tracking a permafrost slump that is edging its way toward the Alaska Highway. If that slump were suddenly to bisect the highway, all road contact between Whitehorse and some of the Yukon’s northern communities would be lost, as well as all access to Alaska.
In northern Quebec, scientists have sensors placed at the airports of three northern communities, hoping to predict any permafrost slumps before they happen.
But the cost of a thawing permafrost can turn out to be greater and a lot more global.
Buried within that frozen layer is a huge amount of organic matter. In the last ice ages, in Siberia and parts of the Yukon and Alaska, large portions of the Arctic were not covered by the glaciers that marched steadily south. In these organically rich regions lived some of the planet’s legendary — now extinct — megafauna, the woolly mammoth and the great auk, as examples.
When the ice age receded, all that organic matter, along with huge amounts of plant biomass, were buried and remains frozen in the permafrost.
But when that organic matter is again unfrozen and exposed to air — when the permafrost surrounding it melts — nature’s organic chemical processes resume. The organic carbon is broken down by bacteria into carbon dioxide and methane.
The permafrost, once a carbon sink, now becomes a source of greenhouse gases.
And those greenhouse gases contribute to the warming of the atmospheric temperatures, meaning they will, among other things, expedite the process of thawing the permafrost.
Ancient pathogens that escape from melting permafrost have real potential to damage microbial communities and might potentially threaten human health, according to a new study by Giovanni Strona of the European Commission Joint Research Centre and colleagues, published July 27 in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology.
The idea that “time-traveling” pathogens trapped in ice or hidden in remote laboratory facilities could break free to cause catastrophic outbreaks has inspired generations of novelists and screenwriters. While melting glaciers and permafrost are giving many types of dormant microbes the opportunity to re-emerge, the potential threats to human health and the environment posed by these microbes have been difficult to estimate.
In a new study, Strona’s team quantified the ecological risks posed by these microbes using computer simulations. The researchers performed artificial evolution experiments where digital virus-like pathogens from the past invade communities of bacteria-like hosts. They compared the effects of invading pathogens on the diversity of host bacteria to diversity in control communities where no invasion occurred.
The team found that in their simulations, the ancient invading pathogens could often survive and evolve in the modern community, and about 3 percent became dominant. While most of the dominant invaders had little effect on the composition of the larger community, about 1 percent of the invaders yielded unpredictable results. Some caused up to one third of the host species to die out, while others increased diversity by up to 12 percent compared to the control simulations.
The risks posed by this 1 percent of released pathogens may seem small, but given the sheer number of ancient microbes regularly released into modern communities, outbreak events still represent a substantial hazard. The new findings suggest that the risks posed by time-traveling pathogens – so far confined to science fiction stories – could in fact be powerful drivers of ecological change and threats to human health.
Citation: Strona G, Bradshaw CJA, Cardoso P, Gotelli NJ, Guillaume F, Manca F, et al. (2023) Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities. PLoS Comput Biol 19(7): e1011268. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268
Author Countries: Australia, Finland, US
Funding: GS, PC, VM and LZ where partly supported by a "HiLIFE BIORESLIENCE seed grant" from the University of Helsinki (https://www.helsinki.fi/en/hilife-helsinki-institute-life-science/research/grand-challenges/understanding-biological-resilience-bioresilience). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
27-Jul-2023
Ancient pathogens emerging from melting ice and permafrost risk eroding ecosystems
Computer simulation shows the release of only 1% of dormant pathogens could cause major environmental damage and the widespread loss of host organisms around the world
IMAGE: PERMAFROST VIRUSES ANIMATION. DR GIOVANNI STRONA OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISION JOINT RESEARCH CENTRE.view more
CREDIT: GIOVANNI STRONA AND OKSANA DOBROVOLSKA 2023 CC-BY-SA
Climate change could hasten the release of ‘time-travelling’ pathogens from melting permafrost and ice that have been trapped for millennia. Their emergence increases threats to the global environment and even humanity itself.
While melting glaciers and permafrost risk the re-emergence of many types of dormant pathogens, the potential destruction to modern ecosystems posed by these microbes has been difficult to predict.
But a new global study by Dr Giovanni Strona of the European Commision Joint Research Centre and Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology Corey Bradshaw from Flinders University in Australia, published today in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology, has calculated the ecological risks posed by the release of these unpredictable ancient microbes.
The researchers constructed simulated experiments where digital pathogens from the past invade communities of bacteria-like hosts. They compared the effects of the invading pathogens on the diversity of host bacteria to those in communities where no invasions occurred.
The researchers found that in their simulations, the ancient invading pathogens could often survive and evolve in the modern world, and about 3% became dominant in their new environment.
About 1% of those invaders presented unpredictable results — some caused up to one third of the host species to die out, while others increased diversity by up to 12% compared to the simulations where escape was not permitted in the simulations.
The risks posed by this 1% of released pathogens might seem small, but given the sheer number of ancient microbes regularly released into modern communities, the researchers say these outbreaks represent a substantial danger.
“The scientific debate on the topic has been dominated by speculation, due to the challenges in collecting data or designing experiments to elaborate and test hypotheses. For the first time, we provide an extensive analysis of the risk posed to modern ecological communities by these ‘time-travelling’ pathogens through advanced computer simulations,” says lead author Dr Giovanni Strona.
“We found that invading pathogens could often survive, evolve and, in a few cases, become exceptionally persistent and dominant in the community, causing either substantial losses or changes in the number of living species. Our findings therefore suggest that unpredictable threats so far confined to science fiction could in reality pose serious risk as powerful drivers of ecological damage.”
Flinders University Professor Corey Bradshaw says the new findings show that the risk of invasion of unknown ‘black swan’ pathogens that can cause irreversible damage is not negligible.
“From that perspective, our results are worrisome, because they point to an actual risk deriving from the rare events where pathogens currently trapped in the permafrost and ice produce severe ecological impacts. In the worst, but still entirely plausible case, the invasion of a single ancient pathogen reduced the size of its host community by 30% when compared to our non-invasive controls.”
“As a society, we need to understand the potential risk posed by these ancient microbes so we can prepare for any unintended consequences of their release into the modern world. The results tell us that the risk is no longer simply a fantasy that we shouldn’t be prepared to defend against.”
The researchers used Avida, an artificial-life software platform developed by Michigan State University, to construct and test the simulated release of the digital pathogens into biological communities.
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