Siberia’s ‘gateway to the underworld’ grows as record heat wave thaws permafrost

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/siberia-s-gateway-underworld-grows-record-heat-wave-thaws-permafrost

By Richard Stone
Jul. 28, 2020 , 2:35 PM

•••••

Global warming is inflicting wounds across Siberia. Outbursts of pent-up methane gas in thawing permafrost have pocked Russia’s desolate Yamal and Gydan peninsulas with holes tens of meters across. Apartment buildings are listing and collapsing on the unsteady ground, causing about $2 billion of damage per year to the Russian economy. Forest fires during the past three summers have torched millions of hectares across Siberia, blanketing the land with dark soot and charcoal that absorb heat and accelerate melting.

Intensifying this year’s fires was a heat wave that baked Siberia for the first half of 2020. On 20 June, the town of Verkhoyansk, just 75 kilometers from Batagay and one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth, reached 38°C, the hottest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic. The record-breaking heat “would have been effectively impossible without human-induced climate change,” said the authors of a 15 July study by World Weather Attribution, a collaboration of meteorologists who analyze the possible influence of climate change on extreme weather events.

An abiding question is how much carbon the thawing soil will release to the atmosphere, and whether the lusher growth of Arctic plants in the warming climate will absorb enough carbon to offset the release. The Arctic may already have reached a tipping point: Based on observations at 100 field sites, northern permafrost released on average about 600 million tons more carbon than vegetation absorbed each year from 2003 to 2017, scientists estimated in October 2019.

•••••

She and colleagues from the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum lodged with Indigenous Siberians—Evens and Sakha—some of whom fear the megaslump. “They say it’s eating their land, swallowing up the trees and their sacred places,” she says.

•••••