Permafrost, the perennially frozen subsoil in Earth’s northernmost regions, has been collecting and storing plant and animal matter since long before the last Ice Age.
Permafrost, the perennially frozen subsoil in Earth’s northernmost regions, has been collecting and storing plant and animal matter since long before the last Ice Age. The decomposition of some of this organic matter naturally releases carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere year-round, where it is absorbed by plant growth during the warmer months.
This region, called the northern permafrost region, is difficult to study, and experiments there are few and far between compared with those in warmer and less remote locations. However, a new synthesis that incorporates datasets gathered from more than 100 Arctic study sites by dozens of institutions, including the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, suggests that as global temperatures rise, the decomposition of organic matter in permafrost soil during the winter months can be substantially greater than previously thought. The new numbers indicate a release of CO2 that far exceeds the corresponding summer uptake.
“Arctic warming is driven by a combination of natural and anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and these new findings indicate that natural emissions from permafrost thaw during winter may be accelerating in response to Arctic warming.” — Roser Matamala, Environmental Science division
Read more at DOE / Argonne National Laboratory
Image: David Cook, a recently retired Argonne meteorologist, performs maintenance on an eddy correlation flux measurement tower, operated by the DOE-funded Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program, in Utqiaġvik, Alaska. The tower exemplifies one of several types of instrumentation used to generate the data in this study. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory/Ryan Sullivan.)
