This is thawing permafrost on the North Slope along the Sagavanirktok River near Deadhorse, Alaska. Credit: Courtesy of Kevin Schaefer of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado Boulder
Posted on 04/09/2012 6:18:02 AM PDT by Red Badger
In a new study reported in Nature, climate scientist Rob DeConto of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues elsewhere propose a simple new mechanism to explain the source of carbon that fed a series of extreme warming events about 55 million years ago, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), and a sequence of similar, smaller warming events afterward.
"The standard hypothesis has been that the source of carbon was in the ocean, in the form of frozen methane gas in ocean-floor sediments," DeConto says. "We are instead ascribing the carbon source to the continents, in polar latitudes where permafrost can store massive amounts of carbon that can be released as CO2 when the permafrost thaws."
The new view is supported by calculations estimating interactions of variables such as greenhouse gas levels, changes in the Earth's tilt and orbit, ancient distributions of vegetation, and carbon stored in rocks and in frozen soil.
While the amounts of carbon involved in the ancient soil-thaw scenarios was likely much greater than today, implications of the study appear dire for the long-term future as polar permafrost carbon deposits have begun to thaw due to burning fossil-fuels, DeConto adds. "Similar dynamics are at play today. Global warming is degrading permafrost in the north polar regions, thawing frozen organic matter, which will decay to release CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. This will only exacerbate future warming in a positive feedback loop."
He and colleagues at Yale, the University of Colorado, Penn State, the University of Urbino, Italy, and the University of Sheffield, U.K., designed an accurate model―elusive up to now―to satisfactorily account for the source, magnitude and timing of carbon release at the PETM and subsequent very warm periods, which now appear to have been triggered by changes in the Earth's orbit.
Earth's atmospheric temperature is a result of energy input from the sun minus what escapes back to space. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere absorbs and traps heat that would otherwise return to space. The PETM was accompanied by a massive carbon input to the atmosphere, with ocean acidification, and was characterized by a global temperature rise of about 5 degrees C in a few thousand years, the researchers point out. Until now, it has been difficult to account for the massive amounts of carbon required to cause such dramatic global warming events.
To build the new model, DeConto's team used a new, high-precision geologic record from rocks in central Italy to show that the PETM and other hyperthermals occurred during periods when Earth's orbit around the sun was both highly eccentric (non-circular) and oblique (tilted). Orbit affects the amount, location and seasonality of solar radiation received on Earth, which in turn affects the seasons, particularly in polar latitudes, where permafrost and stored carbon can accumulate.
They then simulated climate-ecosystem-soil interactions, accounting for gradually rising greenhouse gases and polar temperatures plus the combined effects of changes in Earth orbit. Their results show that the magnitude and timing of the PETM and subsequent hyperthermals can be explained by the orbitally triggered decomposition of soil organic carbon in the circum-Arctic and Antarctica.
This massive carbon reservoir at the poles "had the potential to repeatedly release thousands of petagrams of carbon to the atmosphere-ocean system once a long-term warming threshold was reached just prior to the PETM," DeConto and colleagues say. Until now, Antarctica, which today is covered by kilometers of ice, has not been appreciated as an important player in such global carbon dynamics.
In the past, "Antarctica and high elevations of the circum-Arctic were suitable locations for massive carbon storage," they add. "During long-term warming, these environments eventually reached a climatic threshold," with permafrost thaw and the sudden release of stored soil carbon triggered during the Earth's highly eccentric orbits coupled with high tilt.
The model described in the paper also provides a mechanism that helps to explain relatively rapid recovery from hyperthermals associated with orbital extremes occurring about every 1.2 million years, which had until now been difficult.
Overall, they conclude, "an orbital-permafrost soil carbon mechanism provides a unifying model accounting for the salient features of the hyperthermals that other previously proposed mechanisms fail to explain." Further, if the analysis is correct and past extreme warm events can be attributed to permafrost loss, it implies that thawing of permafrost in similar environments observed today "will provide a substantial positive feedback to future warming."
This is thawing permafrost on the North Slope along the Sagavanirktok River near Deadhorse, Alaska. Credit: Courtesy of Kevin Schaefer of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado Boulder
Ping!..........
doomed !!
doomed i tell you !!
we all are
Likely not. Looks like a pork project in the making.
Wouldn’t it have to warm FIRST in order to melt the permafrost and THEN release the CO2?
OK, so thawing permafrost released CO2.
Now... what caused the permafrost to thaw?
That’s what I thought, but I’m not a politically motivated scientist and the GSA did not put me up in a Holiday Inn express.
Those damn mammoths and T-rex driving SUVs back then!
I think the point is that orbital fluctuations caused the permafrost to begin melting and that released carbon in the form of methane and other gases that sped up the process in a catastrophic manner.....
BMTA
Maybe they got their ‘model’ too close to a heating duct.
Two topics: (1) what caused the permafrost to warm and thaw? (2) just because your model fits THESE data, doesn’t mean your model is “true”.
In other words, it drives me nuts when these ‘scientists’ fail to THINK. If the PERMAfrost melted/thawed, then the earth must have ALREADY been warming. If the earth was ALREADY warming, then snow cover would be retreating as well, and the albedo (reflection of IR off snow cover) was decreasing as well.
It defies simple logic to “believe” the premise that CO2 rise precedes temp rise CAUSED by CO2 release. *IF* the PERMA frost is no longer permanent, and thus releasing CO2, then it MUST have been experiencing prior warming? RIIIIGGGHHHTTT?????
This very issue came up with ALGORE’s Inconvenient Truth — the WARMING in his two graph lines PRECEDED CO2 increase by 400 - 1000 YEARS. Geesh, not this crap again.
But, I bet they were well funded in this research ...
U
The new view is supported by calculations estimating interactions of variables such as greenhouse gas levels, changes in the Earth’s tilt and orbit, ancient distributions of vegetation, and carbon stored in rocks and in frozen soil.
Why do I doubt this math?
OK, so thawing permafrost released CO2. Now... what caused the permafrost to thaw?His High Asininity, The Great Priest of GloBull himself, Al Gore, tells us that "the relationship between carbon and temperature is complicated..."
That's right, Al baby. Complicated in that CO2 increases generally LAGGED temperature increases by as much as 800 years... throughout the entire history of life on earth.
Hmmmm... the Earth is closer to the Sun in WINTER, and further away in SUMMER (or at least for our hemisphere).
If permafrost releases methane gas when it thaws are those permafarts????
But it doesn’t stay that way.
The orbit of the earth alters periodically, slowly, over thousands of years, to where the opposite is true for a looooong time until it comes back to the beginning of the cycle............
Extreme enough to eventually allow the emergence and existence of a human species?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.