Wildfires are digging holes with carbon velocity in the Arctic

But that insulation is being undone by climate change, which is heating the Arctic four times faster like the rest of the planet. “In an undisturbed tundra ecosystem, the permafrost is protected by vegetation,” said climate scientist Yaping Chen of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, lead author of the new paper. and organic layers in the soil from a warming climate. “However, when a fire occurs, it kills vegetation and removes organic layers of insulation to allow heat to penetrate down along the soil surface to melt the permafrost.”

That allows the vegetation to dry more easily and giving it more of a chance to catch fire during the increasingly frequent thunder storms. (More heat means more hot air rising to the atmosphere, that’s how thunderstorm clouds form.) Hotter temperatures due to climate change have triggered the heat-generating process of thawing, the way an ice cube can slowly melt across your countertop. But a forest fire is like keeping a fire for that cube.

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Worse yet, forest fires blacken the ground by burning it, so it will heat up even than quickly under the sun. If the landscape is flat, a neat melting hole will form and grow, because water also readily absorbs solar radiation. All vegetation previously trapped in the ice will also sink to the bottom of the waterhole, making it darker.

The Permafrost is essentially a refrigerator filled with organic matter — and if it heats up and defrosts, bacteria will start to multiply in it, just as they would on your food if you unplugged the refrigerator. cold. Only these tundra bacteria are chewing on organic matter for millennia, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas. 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide. (If there is no standing water in the thawed permafrost and the plant material is drier, the microorganisms will release CO₂ instead, but that’s less likely because craters tend to create small ponds.)

Geophysicist Vladimir Romanovsky, who was not involved in this work, said: “With thermokarst, you can expose deeper and deeper layers of permafrost to thaw, much more efficiently than without. there is thermokarst. “The heat process can turn a relatively dry surface into a wetland, and wetlands are a major source of methane.”