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Twigs, other plant matter, and Ice Age animal parts—bison jaws, horse femurs, mammoth bones—spilled onto a beach that sucked at Zimov’s boots. “I love Duvanny Yar,” he said as he yanked fossils from the muck. “It is like a book. Each page is a story about the history of nature.” Few understand this threat better than Zimov. From a ramshackle research station in the gold-mining outpost of Cherskiy, about three hours by speedboat from Duvanny Yar, he has spent decades unearthing the mysteries of a warming Arctic. Along the way, he has helped upend conventional wisdom—especially the notion that the far north, back in the Pleistocene ice ages, had been an unbroken desert of ice and thin soils dotted with sage.Instead, the abundant fossils of mammoths and other large grazers at Duvanny Yar and other sites told Zimov that Siberia, Alaska, and western Canada had been fertile grasslands, rich with herbs and willows. As these plants and animals died, the cold slowed their decomposition. Over time, windblown silt buried them deep, locking them in permafrost. The upshot is that Arctic permafrost is much richer in carbon than scientists once thought.
Now new discoveries suggest that the carbon will escape faster as the planet warms. From the unexpected speed of Arctic warming and the troubling ways that meltwater moves through polar landscapes, researchers now suspect that for every one degree Celsius rise in Earth’s average temperature, permafrost may release the equivalent of four to six years’ worth of coal, oil, and natural gas emissions—double to triple
Across nine million square miles at the top of the planet, climate change is writing a new chapter. Arctic permafrost isn’t thawing gradually, as scientists once predicted. Geologically speaking, it’s thawing almost overnight. As soils like the ones at Duvanny Yar soften and slump, they’re releasing vestiges of ancient life—and masses of carbon—that have been locked in frozen dirt for millennia. Entering the atmosphere as methane or carbon dioxide, the carbon promises to accelerate climate change, even as humans struggle to curb our fossil fuel emissions. It is perhaps our least appreciated reason to hasten a transition to cleaner energy: To reach whatever goal we set to combat warming, we’ll need to move even faster than we think. Permafrost—ground that remains frozen year-round—is capped by a few feet of dirt and plant detritus. Called the active layer, this soil normally thaws each summer and refreezes in winter, protecting permafrost from rising heat above. But in the spring of 2018, a crew working for Nikita found that dirt near the surface around Cherskiy had not iced up at all during the long dark polar night. That was unheard of: January in Siberia is so brutally cold that human breath can freeze with a tinkling sound that the indigenous Yakuts call “the whisper of stars.” The Soviets used to land heavy planes on the Kolyma. Soil 30 inches down should have been frozen. Instead it was mush.
“Three years ago, the temperature in the ground above our permafrost was minus 3 degrees Celsius [27 degrees Fahrenheit],” Sergey Zimov said. “Then it was minus 2. Then it was minus one. This year, the temperature was plus 2 degrees.” On one level that’s not surprising. Earth’s five warmest years since the late 19th century have come since 2014, and the Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, as it loses the sea ice that helps chill it. In 2017 tundra in Greenland faced its worst known wildfire. Days before we landed in Siberia, thermometers in Lakselv, Norway, 240 miles above the Arctic Circle, recorded a blistering 32 degrees Celsius, or 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Arctic reindeer hid in road tunnels for relief.Permafrost temperatures globally have been rising for half a century. On Alaska’s North Slope, they spiked 11 degrees Fahrenheit in 30 years. Localized thawing of permafrost, especially in villages where development disturbs the surface and allows heat to penetrate, has eroded shorelines, undermined roads and schools, cracked pipelines, and collapsed ice cellars where Arctic hunters store walrus meat and bowhead whale blubber. Warm summers are already warping life for Arctic residents.
What the Zimovs were documenting in 2018, though, was something different, with implications beyond the Arctic: a wintertime thaw. The culprit, paradoxically, was heavy snow. Siberia is dry, but for several winters before 2018, thick snow had smothered the region. The snow acted like a blanket, trapping summer heat in the soil. At a research site 11 miles from Cherskiy, Mathias Goeckede of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry found that snow depth had doubled in five years. By April 2018 temperatures in the active layer had risen 10 degrees Fahrenheit.......stunning photos about a ominous planetary threat!....read on https://www.
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The Dark Side of Fast Fashion.....According to an analysis by Business Insider, fashion production comprises 10% of total global carbon emissions, as much as the emissions generated by the European Union. The industrydries up water sources and pollutes rivers and streams, while 85% of all textiles go to dumps each year. Even washing clothes releases 50 0,000 tons of microfibres into the ocean each year, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles.The Quantis International 2018 report found that the three main drivers of the industry’s global pollution impacts are dyeing and finishing (36%), yarn preparation (28%) and fibre production (15%). The report also established that fibre production has the largest impact on freshwater withdrawal (water diverted or withdrawn from a surface water or groundwater source) and ecosystem quality due to cotton cultivation, while the dyeing and finishing, yarn preparation and fibre production stages have the highest impacts on resource depletion, due to the energy-intensive processes based on fossil fuel energy. According to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, emissions from textile manufacturing alone are projected to skyrocket by 60% by 2030. The time it takes for a product to go through the supply chain, from design to purchase, is called lead time. In 2012, Zara was able to design, produce and deliver a new garment in two weeks; Forever 21 in six weeks and H&M in eight weeks. Newer industry player Shein, a major Chinese fast fashion company, has garments ready to be sold in just 10 days. This results in the fashion industry producing obscene amounts of waste.
1. Water - The environmental impact of fast fashion comprises the depletion of non-renewable sources, emission of greenhouse gases and the use of massive amounts of water and energy. The fashion industry is the second-largest consumer industry of water, requiring about 700 gallons to produce one cotton shirt and 2,000 gallons of water to produce a pair of jeans. Business Insider also cautions that textile dyeing is the world’s second-largest polluter of water, since the water leftover from the dyeing process is often dumped into ditches, streams or rivers.
2. Microplastics - Furthermore, brands use synthetic fibres like polyester, nylon and acrylic which take hundreds of years to biodegrade. A 2017 report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimated that 35% of all microplastics – tiny pieces of non-biodegradable plastic – found in the ocean come from the laundering of synthetic textiles like polyester.......read on https://earth.org/fast-
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Wildfires are thawing the tundra. Researchers discovered recently burned areas emit more methane gas than the rest of the landscape. High Country News Kylie Mohr November 15, 2023 Chunks of carbon-rich frozen soil, or permafrost, undergird much of the Arctic tundra. This perpetually frozen layer sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, sometimes storing it for tens of thousands of years beneath the boggy ground. The frozen soil is insulated by a cool wet blanket of plant litter, moss and peat. But if that blanket is incinerated by a tundra wildfire, the permafrost becomes vulnerable to thawing. And when permafrost thaws, it releases the ancient carbon, which microbes in the soil then convert into methane — a potent greenhouse gas whose release contributes to climate change and the radical reshaping of Northern latitudes across the globe. Research published last month in Environmental Research Letters, a scientific journal, found that methane hot spots on the tundra are more likely to be found in places where wildfires burned recently. The study focused on Alaska’s largest river delta, the Yukon-Kuskokwim, an area previously identified as emitting large amounts of methane.
A team of scientists with NASA’s ABoVE project (Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment), which studies environmental change in Alaska and Western Canada, were curious about the cause of those methane hot spots, which were observed using aerial surveys in 2018. So lead author Elizabeth Yoseph, an intern at the time, overlaid maps of those areas with recent fire activity. Her team found that the hot spots were almost 30% more likely to occur in areas that had experienced wildfire in the last 50 years than in unburned areas, a likelihood that jumped to nearly 90% if the fire’s perimeters touched water. Recently burned wetlands with especially carbon-rich soil had the highest ratio of hot spots. “Fires are an important influence on increasing emissions,” Yoseph said. The large-scale findings, which cover almost 700 square miles in Alaska, help complement field measurements, said Merritt Turetsky, an ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, who was not involved in the research. “We really do need that glue between what’s happening on the ground and what we can detect from satellite images,” she said. The aerial surveys help scientists understand the vast tundra, where field research is limited by road networks that tend to avoid marshy terrain.
The effects of thawing permafrost spread far beyond the Far North. Wildfire’s impact on frozen permafrost propels a climate feedback loop: Wildfires release methane, which accelerates climate change, which causes more frequent wildfires — and repeat......that's a massive amounts of methane!.....read on https://www.hcn.org/
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The Los Angeles Wildfires Are Climate Disasters Compounded. Conditions for a January LA firestorm have not existed before now, writes a meteorologist and climate journalist. Earth Island Journal Eric Holthaus-January 9, 2025An exceptional mix of environmental conditions has created an ongoing firestorm without known historical precedent across southern California this week.The ingredients for these infernos in the Los Angeles area, near-hurricane strength winds and drought, foretell an emerging era of compound events — simultaneous types of historic weather conditions, happening at unusual times of the year, resulting in situations that overwhelm our ability to respond. The Palisades fire now ranks as the most destructive in Los Angeles history with hundreds of homes and other structures destroyed and damage so extensive that it exhausted municipal water supplies. In Pacific Palisades, wealthy homeowners fled by foot after abandoning their cars in gridlocked neighborhoods. In Pasadena, quickly advancing fire prompted evacuations as far into the urban grid as the famous Rose Parade route. Early estimates of the wildfires’ combined economic impact are in the tens of billions of dollars and could place the fires as the most damaging in US history.— exceeding the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California. These fires are a watershed moment, not just for residents of LA, but emblematic of a new era of complex, compound climate disaster. Conditions for a January firestorm in Los Angeles have never existed in all of known history, until they now do.
The short answer is that the greenhouse gases humans continue to emit are fueling the climate crisis and making big fires more common in California.As the atmosphere warms, hotter air evaporates water and can intensify drought more quickly.Melting Arctic ice creates changes in the jet stream’s behavior that make wind-driven large wildfires in California more likely. Recent studies have found that Santa Ana wind events could get less frequent but perhaps more intense in the winter months due to the climate crisis.
The more complicated answer is that these fires are an especially acute example of something climate scientists have been warning about for decades: compound climate disasters that, when they occur simultaneously, produce much more damage than they would individually. As the climate crisis escalates, the interdependent atmospheric, oceanic and ecological systems that constrain human civilization will lead to compounding and regime-shifting changes that are difficult to predict in advance. That idea formed a guiding theme of the Biden administration’s 2023 national climate assessment.....read on https://www.
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- CLIMATE CRISIS! The Planet is ‘on the Brink of an Irreversible Climate Disaster,’ Scientists warn in the 2024 ‘State of the Climate’ Report
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