Thawing Permafrost: Research Suggests It's Not a Climate Tipping Point, but Nevertheless Has Far-Reaching Impacts
3 Articles
3 Articles
Past permafrost dynamics can inform future permafrost carbon-climate feedbacks
Climate warming threatens to destabilize vast northern permafrost areas, potentially releasing large quantities of organic carbon that could further disrupt the climate. Here we synthesize paleorecords of past permafrost-carbon dynamics to contextualize future permafrost stability and carbon feedbacks. We identify key landscape differences between the last deglaciation and today that influence the response of permafrost to atmospheric warming, a…
Thawing permafrost: Research suggests it's not a climate tipping point, but nevertheless has far-reaching impacts
Permafrost soils store large quantities of organic carbon and are often portrayed as a critical tipping element in the Earth system, which, once global warming has reached a certain level, suddenly and globally collapses. Yet this image of a ticking timebomb, one that remains relatively quiet until, at a certain level of warming, it goes off, is a controversial one among the research community.
The risk of abrupt, irreversible changes in the climate is growing. However, exponential developments could also be initiated in climate protection – for the good.
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