No drama: thawing permafrost likely to happen ‘ in step with climate change’, study says

Arctic permafrost with ice wedge [credit: USGS]

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Claims and theories of a ‘ticking timebomb’ get defused, although the study talks up other supposedly avoidable, or at least partly preventable, issues with melting permafrost in a warming world. But in an earlier (2021) study: Increasing Pleistocene permafrost persistence and carbon cycle conundrums inferred from Canadian speleothems, it was found that ‘interglacial greenhouse gas concentrations were relatively stable throughout the Pleistocene, suggesting that either permafrost thaw did not trigger substantial carbon release to the atmosphere or it was offset by carbon uptake elsewhere on glacial-interglacial time scales.’ The 2021 study data from certain periods ‘suggests that greenhouse gas concentrations during these interglacials were relatively insensitive to permafrost thaw’, again negating or casting doubt on alarmist ideas about likely consequences.
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Permafrost soils store large quantities of organic carbon and are often portrayed as a critical tipping element in the Earth system, which, once global warming has reached a certain level, suddenly and globally collapses.

Yet this image of a ticking timebomb, one that remains relatively quiet until, at a certain level of warming, it goes off, is a controversial one among the research community, says Science Daily.

Based on the scientific data currently available, the image is deceptive, as an international team has shown in a recently released study.

According to their findings, there is no single global tipping point; rather, there are numerous local and regional ones, which ‘tip’ at different times, producing cumulative effects and causing the permafrost to thaw in step with climate change.

Full article says Science Daily.
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Image: Arctic permafrost with ice wedge [credit: USGS]