As If the Arctic Didn't Have Enough Problems, Now It Smells Like a Frog Pond

Melting and Sinking Arctic Permafrost. Photo courtesy of National Geographic Creative/Alamy Stock Photo.

MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2019: Good afternoon, folks! And best wishes to all who are planning to join the worldwide Climate Strike in late September. Here in Seattle, my fellow buskers and I are scanning the skies in a state of general anxiety, wondering when the wildfire smoke from Siberia will start looming overhead, and choking off our singing voices. Wildfires continue raging in Alaska, Siberia and British Columbia; and the wafting smoke from all three regions has the Pacific Northwest in its crosshairs.

Meanwhile, the global Arctic region has continued in its abnormal heatwave; and one effect of this is the widespread thawing and melting of permafrost that has covered the Arctic landscape for millennia--in some areas, since the last Ice Age back in late Paleolithic times. And despite the dry humor about planned mammoth barbecue festivals, this byproduct of worldwide warming is a serious matter, both for human and animal communities that call the Arctic region home. Besides the critical risk of mass starvation of Arctic predators and marine mammals, human settlements and communities in Siberia and elsewhere are feeling the effects of melting permafrost in the destabilization of homes, farm buildings and roads; mosquito and other insect infestations are occurring in places where they were never seen before; and entire indigenous villages are facing the decision to uproot themselves and migrate to cooler and more stable parcels of land not yet flooded.

Thermokarst lake development; photo courtesy of Phys.org

Melting underground ice is creating thermokarst lakes, water-filled sinkholes that cause dangerous slumping in the overlying ground surface (not to mention releases of greenhouse gases from melting permafrost just beneath the lakes). Families are visiting cemeteries to find the remains of loved ones floating at the surfaces of flooded graves. And lest you think the effects of thawing permafrost are strictly localized, both the melting subterranean ice and decaying organic matter that was frozen for millennia are doing what they do everywhere else: releasing substantial amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. Needless to say, there's nothing that bacterial microbes love more than new organic food sources; hence they're getting right to work producing gag-inducing swamp gases not smelled in the Arctic since the Pleistocene period, at least. At present, permafrost-generated methane accounts for a very small percentage of methane yields worldwide; but it appears that the Arctic permafrost melt is just getting started, and not expected to reverse its trend anytime soon. This is all the more reason for research and development of methane capture and reduction methods to go into overdrive immediately, whatever spin that corporate-polluter lawyers and PR people are spewing this week. Join me in researching and brainstorming how to capture and make use of methane and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, right here and now.

UPDATE (TUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2019): Perhaps I should be reading the English-language Siberian Times more often. I just found an article detailing factors behind the wildfires raging across Siberia at present (apparently, many of them were caused by farmers burning grass on plots of land slated for planting). Here (to the left) is a satellite map from the same article, pinpointing the current locations of the larger wildfires. Stay safe, Russia, Alaska, and arctic Canada...