PERMAFROST A CLIMATE TIME BOMB.pptx
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Permafrost is a layer of soil, rock or sediment that is frozen for more than two consecutive years. It is commonly found in snowy, high-altitude mountains. It can vary in depth from a few metres to more than 100.
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PERMAFROST A CLIMATE TIME BOMB.pptx
- 1. By, Anitha. V PhD Scholar PERMAFROST : A CLIMATE TIME BOMB
- 2. Soil that is frozen more than 2 continuous years High-altitude mountains and Earth’s higher latitudes It can vary in depth from a few meters to more than
- 3. 24 percent of the land in the Northern Hemisphere has permafrost - 23 million square kilometers (9 million square miles) 58% of land – freezes seasonally – 55 million sq km (21 million sq miles)
- 11. • Permafrost soils contain roughly twice as much carbon—mainly in the form of methane and CO2—as Earth's atmosphere. • Most of the carbon stocks are thought to reside fairly close to the surface.
- 16. Frozen diseases? The thawing of the permafrost also threatens to unlock disease-causing bacteria and viruses long trapped in the ice. There have already been some cases of this happening. In 2016 a child died in Russia's far northern Siberia in an outbreak of anthrax that scientists said seemed to have come from the corpses of infected reindeers.
- 17. 70 people in western Siberia were hospitalized for exposure to anthrax. Scientists have also warned that other dormant pathogens entombed in frozen soil may be roused by global warming, such as from old smallpox graves. In 2014 scientists revived a giant but harmless virus, dubbed Pithovirus sibericum, that had been locked in the Siberian permafrost for more than 30,000 years.
- 19. Risks to roads, pipelines
- 23. As the Arctic, including much of Siberia, warms at least twice as fast as the rest of the world. The loss of permafrost deforms the landscape itself, knocking down houses and barns. The migration patterns of animals hunted for centuries are shifting, and severe floods wreak havoc almost every spring.
- 28. Zhenquancuo lake
- 30. Xianhe lake
- 31. Jiangi Caka lake
- 32. Xianhe lake
- 33. Siling Co lake
- 40. “The grass used to be up to the knees … Twenty years ago, we had to scythe it down. But now, well, you can see for yourself. It’s so short it looks like moss” PHUNTSOK DORJE A Tibetan nomad in an interview with The Guardian, 2010
- 41. China’s plan to use solar power to melt permafrost to turn a Tibetan grassland into an artificial forest on the roof of the world. Scientists question the value and environmental impact of the expensive project, which is of special interest to the Chinese president Nagqu’s wildlife reserves protect wolves, foxes and bears that prey on wild goats and donkeys. The animals have adapted to the high-altitude grassland over millions of years.
- 43. REFERENCE https://phys.org/news/2018-12-permafrost- climate.html https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/permafrost-a-ticking-time- bomb https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2111 247/melting-permafrost-flows-lava-through-valley- tibetan-plateau https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9655974/arctic- heatwave-greenland-ice-sheet-melt/ Poket news
- 44. THANK YOU…
Editor's Notes
- Permafrost is a layer of soil, rock or sediment that is frozen for more than two consecutive years. It is commonly found in snowy, high-altitude mountains. It can vary in depth from a few metres to more than 100. Permafrost typically remains at or below 0°C for at least two years. Found in areas with temperatures below 0°C for most of the year, permafrost can be found in Arctic regions such as Northern Canada, Greenland, Russia, and China. Permafrost is often located on land but also exists below some parts of the ocean floor. It generally can range in thickness from 1 meter to more than 1,000 meters. It stretches approximately 22.8 million square kilometers in the Earth's Northern Hemisphere. As long as the temperature in the ground stays below the freezing point, permafrost does not have to contain any water or ice, even it is completely dry. If permafrost begins to warm significantly, it thaws.
- Permafrost is found mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, where it covers about a quarter of exposed land and is generally thousands of years old. Permafrost exists to a lesser degree in the Southern Hemisphere where there is less ground to freeze, including in the South American Andes and below Antarctica.
- Large expanses of permafrost occur in Siberia, the Tibetan Plateau, Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, and other higher mountain regions. Alaska, Canada, northern Europe and Russia. Russia 70% Permafrost landmass Alaska 85 % permafrost
- A typical classification recognizes continuous permafrost (underlying 90-100% of the landscape); discontinuous permafrost (50-90%); and sporadic permafrost (10-50%).
- it is especially prevalent in areas above the 50th parallel north
- When permafrost melts, this matter warms up and decomposes, eventually releasing the carbon that it holds as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, gases which have a greenhouse warming effect on the planet.
- CO2 is the most abundant greenhouse gas blamed for global warming but methane is 25 times more efficient at trapping heat.
- The release of greenhouse gases threatens a vicious circle in the warming of the Earth, jeopardising the objective set in the 2015 Paris Agreement to strive to limit the rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Adding these into the atmosphere will spur further warming and ice melt, which will in turn cause more thawing of the permafrost and free up more locked-up carbon.
- Even if global warming were stabilised at around 2 C, research points to a 30-percent loss of permafrost by 2100, This could reach up to 70 percent assuming emissions continue on their current trajectory, her research said, warning that "emissions from permafrost could lead to out-of-control global warming".
- That means microbes, seeds and spores, frozen in a dormant state, could awaken with a little warming.
- A permafrost thaw could be a boon for the oil and mining industries, providing access to previously difficult-to-reach reserves. But it also presents a serious and costly threat to infrastructure, risking mudslides and damage to buildings, roads and oil pipelines. A Greenpeace report published in 2009 said thawing soil in Russia's permafrost zones caused buildings, bridges and pipelines to deform and collapse, costing up to 1.3 billion euros (nearly $1.5 billion) a year in repairs in western Siberia. In Alaska alone, the destruction of buildings and infrastructure due to permafrost thaw over the next century could cost more than $2 billion, according to a 2017 study.
- This was proven in 2012, when researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences sprouted three dozen Silene stenophylla, herby white tundra flowers, from 30,000-year-old fruits. The specimens were recovered from ancient squirrel burrows, 125 feet deep in the permafrost of northeast Russia, according to the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. After sprouting in nutrient-rich test tubes, the seedlings had run-of-the-mill plant lives: They grew into fruit-bearing flowers in plastic pots and soil, resuming normal biological activity after being frozen for 300 centuries.
- The Tibetan Plateau 1,300 million square metres of frozen ground, the Tibetan Plateau is the largest alpine permafrost region in the world.
- The huge impact in the Siling Co lake Fed by the rivers Boques Tsangpo and Za'gya Zangbo, this salt lake is one that shows one of the biggest increase in water levels in the last 30 years, according to studiesconducted by the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, the lake has grown approximately 45 per cent since 1970
- Rola Co lake The Rola Co is a large freshwater lake located in the district of Shuanghu, Nagqu province of China. It has grown to the point that it has merged with the neighbouring Danbing lake
- The Tibetan Plateau is a vast, treeless region covered in seasonal grass. It is lightly populated because of the cold environment, but the nomads who do live here have watched the grass disappear and the ground melt. The life they knew is vanishing before their eyes.
- Nagqu, a city with a near-polar climate in the high grasslands of Tibet, is known for its stark beauty, its wildlife and its role as the former capital of the Zhangzhung kingdom. But it has a second, more dubious distinction: it is believed to be the only Chinese city without a tree. The absence of trees ranked along with the area’s lack of oxygen, extreme cold and geographic isolation as top reasons for the mental breakdown of Chinese military personnel in this city 4,500 metres above sea level. Soldiers from Nagqu who would go to Lhasa on leave were known to leap off their buses to hug a tree, in tears, according to the People’s Liberation Army Daily. Now China is taking the unprecedented – and expensive – step of harnessing solar power to melt permafrost to allow trees to grow in Nagqu. The project’s aim is to make the landscape more welcoming for Han settlers and soldiers struggling to cope emotionally with the treeless setting. But worries about the cost and the environmental impact of the undertaking – which has captured the attention of President Xi Jinping – have scientists questioning its value. “Some official might do this to flatter the president, but most scientists have concerns about this project,” said a researcher who spoke to the South China Morning Post on condition of anonymity. Workers have set up grassland solar panels in the area to convert sunlight to electricity for an enormous copper-wire grid buried in the ground. The generated heat melts the subsurface layer of frozen soil to save tree roots from “frostbite”, according to scientists who have visited the experimental site. In recent months, a forest has begun to emerge. Encompassing an area equivalent to more than 30 sports stadiums, it consists of fir, cypress and pine trees, according to a report on the website of the Science and Technology Department of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. The project’s cost could run into the tens of millions of yuan. “This is not sustainable,” another scientist said. “These can be the most expensive trees in the world,” another said. One scientist who has observed the area for years said the project would upset the Tibetan Plateau’s ecological balance. The sudden emergence of an artificial forest and solar power plants would drain the area’s water resources, ruin the natural habitat and disrupt the fragile food chain, the scientist said. Nagqu’s seven wildlife reserves protect various animals, including bears, foxes and wolves, which prey on the region’s wildlife, including goats and donkeys. The animals have adapted to the high-altitude grassland over millions of years. The project’s cost could run into the tens of millions of yuan. “This is not sustainable,” another scientist said. “These can be the most expensive trees in the world,” another said. One scientist who has observed the area for years said the project would upset the Tibetan Plateau’s ecological balance. The sudden emergence of an artificial forest and solar power plants would drain the area’s water resources, ruin the natural habitat and disrupt the fragile food chain, the scientist said. Nagqu’s seven wildlife reserves protect various animals, including bears, foxes and wolves, which prey on the region’s wildlife, including goats and donkeys. The animals have adapted to the high-altitude grassland over millions of years. Nagqu’s elevation makes it almost as tall as Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps. Millions of yuan have been spent over the past few decades on efforts to make trees grow in Nagdu, according to PLA Daily. The methods used have included cultivating trees under a glass roof, feeding the trees vitamin pills, pouring warm water on the soil and covering branches with plastic membrane. None has survived. The current attempt seeks to use solar panels to increase the soil temperature by several degrees. That change could prevent the permafrost from halting lignification, the bio-chemical process that hardens the walls of cells to turn a plant woody, according to one of the scientists. Machines with specially designed bore heads handled the planting – both to boost productivity and reduce human error. A sophisticated network of sensors connected to a computer running an artificial intelligence algorithm keeps watch over the young trees – sounding an alert if, say, a twig snaps in the wind. If the strategy, which has never before been applied to create an artificial forest, proved effective this winter, trees might start appearing in Nagqu city in the years to come, a scientist said. President Xi Jinping, who visited Nagqu while deputy party secretary of Fujian province in the late 1990s, said he vividly remembered the city as set on a plateau of permafrost in a harsh environment similar to that of polar regions. “To people who could plant a tree and make it live, the reward [by the local government] started from the earliest amount of several thousand yuan, to 100,000 yuan (US$15,100) in the year I went,” the president was quoted by People’s Daily as saying in a meeting with more than 200 county-level Communist Party secretaries in 2015. “But nobody was able to get the money.” Last month, Xi was briefed by the Ministry of Science and Technology on the new forestation project. Afterward, he said he would “continue to pay attention to Nagqu’s tree plantation programme”, according to the Tibetan Science and Technology Department article. China has spent US$10 billion annually over the last decade to create new forests across the nation. The reforestation campaign has reversed the expansion of some of the world’s biggest deserts, almost eliminated the dust storms that frequently have hit Beijing in the spring, and turned wastelands larger than California green. China’s reforestation campaign has reversed the expansion of some of the world’s largest deserts. Photo: But the campaign also has prompted ecological concern as the massive plantation of non-native species reduces biodiversity and increases the risk of outbreaks of disease or pests. The owner of a Sichuan restaurant near the Nagqu government offices said he hoped the tree experiment in the city succeeded, because the sight of green-needled, long-limbed additions could ease his homesickness. “I miss sitting in the shade of a tree and listening to the rustling of leaves,” said the man, who was originally from Chengdu, Sichuan. An increasing number of people shared his feeling, he said. In 2010, native Tibetans, mostly herdsmen and women, accounted for more than 96 per cent of Nagqu’s population of 460,000, according to official statistics. Now nearly half the population comprised Han Chinese from inland China, the restaurant owner said. Besides trees, the new migrants also would like tap water. Owing to water’s ability to easily freeze in pipes in the permafrost, most families still depend on trucks or tractors to obtain water from rivers or wells.