From the University of Georgia, where apparently they didn’t read this paper before publishing their own and this press release.
Warming climate may release vast amounts of carbon from long-frozen Arctic soils
Credit: Skidaway Institute of Oceanography
Savannah, Ga. – While climatologists are carefully watching carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, another group of scientists is exploring a massive storehouse of carbon that has the potential to significantly affect the climate change picture.
University of Georgia Skidaway Institute of Oceanography researcher Aron Stubbins is part of a team investigating how ancient carbon, locked away in Arctic permafrost for thousands of years, is now being transformed into carbon dioxide and released into the atmosphere. The results of the study were published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The Arctic contains a massive amount of carbon in the form of frozen soil–the remnants of plants and animals that died more than 20,000 years ago. Because this organic material was permanently frozen year-round, it did not undergo decomposition by bacteria the way organic material does in a warmer climate. Just like food in a home freezer, it has been locked away from the bacteria that would otherwise cause it to decay and be converted to carbon dioxide.
“However, if you allow your food to defrost, eventually bacteria will eat away at it, causing it to decompose and release carbon dioxide,” Stubbins said. “The same thing happens to permafrost when it thaws.”
Scientists estimate there is more than 10 times the amount of carbon in the Arctic soil than has been put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution. To look at it another way, scientists estimate there is two and a half times more carbon locked away in the Arctic deep freezer than there is in the atmosphere today. Now, with a warming climate, that deep freezer is beginning to thaw and that long-frozen carbon is beginning to be released into the environment.
“The study we did was to look at what happens to that organic carbon when it is released,” Stubbins said. “Does it get converted to carbon dioxide or is it still going to be preserved in some other form?”
Stubbins and his colleagues conducted their fieldwork at Duvanni Yar in Siberia. There, the Kolyma River carves into a bank of permafrost, exposing the frozen organic material. This worked well for the scientists, as they were able to find streams that consisted of 100 percent thawed permafrost. The researchers measured the carbon concentration, how old the carbon was and what forms of carbon were present in the water. They bottled it with a sample of the local microbes. After two weeks, they measured the changes in the carbon concentration and composition and the amount of carbon dioxide that had been produced.
“We found that decomposition converted 60 percent of the carbon in the thawed permafrost to carbon dioxide in two weeks,” Stubbins said. “This shows the permafrost carbon is definitely in a form that can be used by the microbes.”
Lead author Robert Spencer of Florida State University added, “Interestingly, we also found that the unique composition of thawed permafrost carbon is what makes the material so attractive to microbes.”
The study also confirmed what the scientists had suspected: The carbon being used by the bacteria is at least 20,000 years old. This is significant because it means that carbon has not been a part of the global carbon cycle in the recent past.
“If you cut down a tree and burn it, you are simply returning the carbon in that tree to the atmosphere where the tree originally got it,” Stubbins said. “However, this is carbon that has been locked away in a deep-freeze storage for a long time.
“This is carbon that has been out of the active, natural system for tens of thousands of years. To reintroduce it into the contemporary system will have an effect.”
The carbon release has the potential to create what scientists call a positive feedback loop. This means as more carbon is released into the atmosphere, it would amplify climate warming. That, in turn, would cause more permafrost to thaw and release more carbon, causing the cycle to continue.
“Currently, this is not a process that shows up in future (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) climate projections; in fact, permafrost is not even accounted for,” Spencer said.
“Moving forward, we need to find out how consistent our findings are and to work with a broader range of scientists to better predict how fast this process will happen,” Stubbins said.
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In addition to Stubbins and Spencer, the research team included Paul Mann from Northumbria University, United Kingdom; Thorsten Dittmar from the University of Oldenburg, Germany; Timothy Eglinton and Cameron McIntyre from the Geological Institute, Zurich, Switzerland; Max Holmes from Woods Hole Research Center; and Nikita Zimov from the Far-Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Science.
Even the paper that you referenced at the top of this article shows a jump in temperatures associated with anthropogenic global warming, as is seen in every single paleoclimate record, from speleotherm and coral deposits to seafloor and lake bed samples. Now add permafrost sample analysis to the hockey stick record. your rope is getting shorter and shorter by the day!
Graphic from the linked paper: Long-term winter warming trend in the Siberian Arctic during the mid- to late Holocene
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v8/n2/images/ngeo2349-f3.jpg
“the grey bands show the uncertainty caused by the radiocarbon dating”………..
ROTFL
Jai– if you look at global temp Ice core proxies going back 300,000 years, you’ll see that when glaciation periods ended and global temps started to rise, CO2 levels were still falling, and when the Earth ended interglacials and global temps started to fall, CO2 levels were still rising….
There is about an 800 year lag between global temp shifts and CO2 level shifts…. Falling/rising CO2 levels are a RESULT of global cooling/warming, not the cause….
Samurai
your information is outdated, there has been comparisons with the NEEM ice core data and the lag time is significantly reduced. This is because the ice core data that you are talking about is from the southern hemisphere but he land-carbon effects occur in the northern hemisphere, since the milankovitch cycles operate opposite in the two hemispheres the temp and CO2 responses occur somewhat independently of each other. check it out.
Looks more like a MANNifestation of Mikey’s left leg than a hockey stick
hide the decline works for jai- what trees? i didnt see any proxy that said that.. hehe
Splicing differently calculated reconstructions with calculated averages from sensors is a Mannian trick. One of the reasons why reconstructions are not carried all the way to the present is that not all “treemometers” rise like a hocky stick at the end. Some do and some don’t. Mann solved this wicked problem by simply ending the reconstructions at a point in time before his proxies diverged from the sensor record. Your graph contains such a splice. Proxies (trees, shells, ice, etc) average temperatures naturally in their response to temperature changes. Sensors do not. That is a calculated average. The two data sources should never be displayed together. It is comparing apples to oranges and demonstrates the ultimate error in using two entirely different methods of creating “average” data and calling it one whole thing.
Bad graph. And if you think I am wrong, ask a mathematician if the two ways of developing a reconstruction (IE splicing trees, or ice, or clam shell rings, together with averaged daily temperature readings) is a valid and reliable method to demonstrate changes in temperature from ancient times to today.
While we’re looking at the Arctic, has there been a breakdown in satellite coverage?
The Sea Ice pages at Cryosphere (http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/) have not been updated since April 12, 2015.
EtuDiant– I can’t believe it’s been over 2 weeks since the last “daily” sea ice update..
I actually sent an e-mail to UIUC.edu asking for the reason for the cessation, but, of course, no reply or explanation on their website…
I personally think it’s because the data is so bad for the CAGW alarmists, they’re trying to develop a new algorithm to lower the size of sea ice, but that’s just speculation…
Samurai. Your suspicions are well founded. Several times in the past few years the national debt was flat for periods from weeks to months. The way Obama and his lapdog congress spend money how could the national debt stay constant (not increasing or decreasing, just constant) a clear sign that the government continues to fiddle with our data to suit their purposes.
The satellite is on strike. It wants $15 USD per hour. I also have been checking every day and there seems to be no change forever. I like watching ice melt, and paint dry…
Increased greenhouse gas forcing of the climate increases positive AO/NAO. That would tend cause the Arctic to cool and not to warm.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-3-5-6.html
tend to..
“However, if you allow your food to defrost, eventually bacteria will eat away at it, causing it to decompose and release carbon dioxide,” Stubbins said. “The same thing happens to permafrost when it thaws.”
I assume this is what happens at the end of every ice age.
http://www.climatedata.info/Proxy/Proxy/icecores_files/BIGw05-vostok-temperature-and-co2.gif.gif
The ground freezes for tens of thousands of years then it thaws out.
If it’s that bad, then the OCO-2 satellite should be seeing it. So I went to have a look and got this:
Can’t be measuring enough anthropogenically generated CO2 so it has to be corrected.
But no, it’s worse than I thought:
Oops. Maybe some of the sneaky CO2 generating bacteria went for a ride on the satellite and it’s seeing double …
We’re living in an interglacial period – not that we have any experience living in such a period of time as this – so what’s its supposed to be like living in an interglacial period?
“scientists estimate there is two and a half times more carbon locked away in the Arctic deep freezer than there is in the atmosphere today.”
Be interesting to see this “estimation”. That would be a huge reservoir. The atmosphere is thought to hold about 700 Gt and the permafrost would be 1750 by their estimate. Unless it accumulated through successive interglacial cycles this number seems impossible because it is three times the 550 Gt thought to be currently stored in plant biomass over the entire planet today.
Please don’t go around checking the alarmists numbers. You trying to cause trouble?
Sorry to butt in here Anthony, but you should have a look at James Delingpole’ s place.
http://www.brietbart.com/author/james-delingpole/
He has a great link to an open letter to the Pope from the Cornwall Alliance which contains a “who’s who” of climate realists.
Not that I expect this initiative to make a blind bit of difference to this blinkered Pontiff.
It buggers the mind to think what silly things can get people all twisted up and worried.
The headlines scream:
Arctic Soil Has Two-And-A-Half Times More Carbon than In Atmosphere Today !!!
http://newsmaine.net/23187-arctic-soil-has-two-and-half-times-more-carbon-atmosphere-today
Well, forget looking at charts or discussing temps, just think about it and for the sake of argument, just accept that huge amounts of carbon are indeed trapped in permafrost which happens to be melting. Just give them that, don’t even argue over the prickly details like extent of melting, rates of release or bacterial action dynamics.
It’s really simple:
How did all that carbon get there in the first place? Would it not have to have been warmer at some point in the past in order for plants to grow and “trap” all that up in the first place?
Why don’t the chicken little-types acknowledge that we are in a warming trend that has been more or less constant since the end of the last major glacial period?
And lastly, why is the historical evidence that earth’s climate is generally more cool than hot conveniently overlooked? Warming periods tend to be more the exception than the rule.
But, I’m not a “scientist” but this isn’t even difficult.
“But, I’m not a “scientist” but this isn’t even difficult.”
The reason you think that this is not difficult is because as a non scientists you don’t have to grub for grant money. If you had millions riding on your belief in the magic of the CO2 molecule you would have trouble seeing reality yourself.
Indubitably.
“Professional interest is best served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating laity to priesthood… It has political allies to guard its marches.” – I quit, I think | John Taylor Gatto
It will be no surprise if mainstream climate ‘reporters’ report on this paper and exaggerate the conclusion if it’s not scary enough.
An article in the April 23 WaPo by Sarah Kaplan titled Tantalizing evidence of a mass extinction begins with this paragraph:
The implication that a rapid warming from increased CO2 is the culprit doesn’t come from the paper being reported on. In fact, the paper considers many possible causes, including intermittent cooling from volcanic aerosols.
I was curious that bamboo regardless of location if from the same original plant seems to have a clock which determines that it is time to flower and die. Why would it do that ?
Is it a biological clock ? or could it be some other sort of clock cycle ?
what other things might have a non-biological clock ?
some people are saying that people who are even quite elderly today might expect to live to one hundred and fifty years of age. I think that the internet is going to be really weird by then.
Methuselah lived 969 years, and I don’t think he had a pacemaker or any prostrate operations. Maybe he was an alien Annunaki type. You know, the aliens who built the pyramids, and other stuff that humans “couldn’t build” before 2000 BC.
Never heard of the Annunakis until my PhD friend who teaches Physics, Computer Science. and Mathematics at the university level informed me about them. (I have no idea if he was serious, he is always “pulling my leg”).
He lived that long but didn’t accomplish anything the Bible thought worth mentioning.
Yeah, Mike! It’s like they pulled that story out of the Apocrypha or something. It mentions super-beings of immense size, referred to as the “sons of God”. supposedly they found human women irresistible and created progeny such as the Philistines and figures such as Goliath.
In scientifically disconnected news:
Ocean bacteria get ‘pumped up’: Team discovers new factors impacting fate of sinking carbon
http://phys.org/news/2015-04-ocean-bacteria-team-factors-impacting.html
The carbon cycle has been discovered! While too soon to tell, it’s almost like the earth has the capacity to regulate carbon by various and sundry means, one of which is the ocean, a fairly large puddle of water found in some portions of the the globe. Yay, bacteria!
Now, if we can cut down on our anti-bacterial soap usage, we may yet save the planet!
The Arctic contains a massive amount of carbon in the form of frozen soil–the remnants of plants and animals that died more than 20,000 years ago …
=====================================
In Siberia trees have not yet recolonised areas where they grew during the MWP.
“Dendroecological studies indicate enhanced conifer recruitment during the twentieth century. However, conifers have not yet recolonized many areas where trees were present during the Medieval Warm period (ca AD 800–1300) or the Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM; ca 10 000–3000 years ago)”:
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/363/1501/2283
Since it is based on a complete fantasy, the answer is “never”. But I’m sure they can create marvelous models “showing” it happening in 50 years. Then the models will become “evidence”.
Their models always beg the question. They hard code warming caused by an increase in CO2 into their simulations so that is what their results show. Their results are not evidence but just a waste of time and money.
Errm heres a question, they have dated the Carbon at 20,000 years old, but this was at the last Glacial maximum! So how exactly were the plants that trapped the carbon able to grow in an area which would have been 8C colder than current conditions in which it is still covered in permafrost?
Magic beans?
The only thing this does for me is help confirm the evidence that Carbon Dioxide levels follow temperature and not the other way round. The doomsday shrieking, I just ignore.
The previous interglacial period was warmer than this one with more ice cap melting and higher sea levels so there must have been more permafrost melting as well. Yet a climate tipping point was never achieve and the next ice age started on schedule. There was no huge increase in CO2. Along with more CO2 in the atmosphere of the Arctic one would expect more H2O as well. If any greenhouse gas actually affected climate change then the lion’s share of the effect should be attributed to H2O. However; in terms of the radiant greenhouse effect, H2O provides ample negative feedbacks so as to mitigate the effects that the other greenhouse gases might have on climate. If CO2 did have a significant effect on climate then changes in CO2 should have a noticeable effect on the temperature lapse rate in the troposphere but it does not.
I recall clearly a study from one of the big acronym groups (NASA?) a few years ago that looked at melting of permafrost in the Arctic. What they found is that when the permafrost melts, it creates wet, rich soil from which sprout with great enthusiasm, scrub bushes. Which in turn, shade the ground, preventing more melting. Obviously, a balance is reached, and as I recall, it was no more than a foot or two of permafrost that would melt. Seems to me that the all that bacteria making CO2 would locally enhance plant growth, further speeding the arrival of the negative feedback of plant growth. Nature’s own carbon capture and sequestration program.
Maybe these “scientists” should have put some plants in their mason jar, or even done the experiment in a greenhouse covering a patch of realistic terrain.
Last question: The melt water was “carbon enhanced.” Can plants use such water for their own growth process? If yes, then the growth of melt-preventing bushes would be even further speeded.
What utter nonsense. Did they even bother to look at the methane atmospheric graphs? Methane has been with us all along. It is a convex curve, continually increasing, but at a continually decreasing rate, as the circumference of effect continually lessens.
Either they know and are being disingenuous, or they do not, which betrays a surprising ignorance of the bottom line.
“Now, with a warming climate, that deep freezer is beginning to thaw and that long-frozen carbon is beginning to be released into the environment.”
So, we should be seeing an increase in global temperatures?
As we are not, and the global temperatures are staying the same, what are we supposed to think the climate sensitivity is?
That it’s not high.
The long period of temperatures staying the same, while CO2 increases, implicates a low climate sensitivity.
Also, is the University of Georgia proposing CO2 rises after the temperature increases?
Thanks, Anthony.
Andres,
They (rent seeking wannbe scientists) have just acknowledged higher temps create more CO2 and when you consider the original co2 that kicked off the gravy train came from us then………………
If the permafrost melts vegetation will take over, sucking more CO2 out of the atmosphere. Positive feedback? Probably not.
Relevant article by Anthony et al in Nature from 9 months ago.
So permafrost has stayed exactly the same for 20,000 years? this permafrost argument seems ridiculous.
The amount of Carbon and CO2 in this ice is no different than the soil was and the atmosphere was when the water infiltrated and froze.
That means it may have froze in 185 ppm CO2 content and, during the ice ages, basically nothing was growing where the permafrost formed. No C3 bushes or plants were growing here, not even tundra because CO2 was too low and precipitation especially was far too low in the region. Some cold-hardy C4 grasses were all that was growing here.
When this permafrost water, sand and rock melts, it is more likely to absorb CO2 out of the atmosphere and to fix Carbon with the microbes that will grow in it since it formed in extremely low CO2 conditions.
These people are NOT scientists. They are scaremongers.
“These people are not SCIENTISTS”. They are grantgrabbers.