What Lies Within the Permafrost Will Escape Within Decades, Warns NASA

The most pervasive human fear is the fear of the unknown. One of the things we know very little about, unfortunately, is what lies inside the frozen layer of the tundra known as the permafrost. Long thought to be permanently frozen, it’s now melting much more rapidly than we ever thought, reported NASA scientists in a study in The Cryosphere on Tuesday. A lot of the stuff that lies within it, they warn, will be released within the next few decades.

Of course, they’re not completely clueless about what’s trapped there. Their paper concerns the massive stores of carbon that they know lurk deep in the frozen layers of the tundra, trapped there years ago as leaves and other organic material that never decayed. The tundra covers some 5.5 percent of the Earth’s surface, and at the rate the permafrost is thawing due to climate change, they write, the amount of atmospheric carbon that gets released over the the next 300 years will be ten times the amount of carbon we put into the air in 2016. This, of course, will only make climate change worse.


Source : Yahoo