Warming Climate May Release Massive Carbon Storehouse from Arctic Soils

It's no secret that our warming climate is causing ice everywhere to melt, but now new research shows that this thaw may release a massive storehouse of carbon in long-frozen Arctic soils. This could potentially have a catastrophic effect on climate change, which is already wreaking havoc on the environment and wildlife around the world.

While climatologists have been closely monitoring carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere, it seems they should be focusing just as much on what's under their feet as what's in the air. The Arctic contains a massive amount of carbon locked within its frozen soil - the remnants of plants and animals that died more than 20,000 years ago.

Until recently, this permafrost had not been a threat to our climate. That's because it was frozen year-round, and didn't undergo decomposition by bacteria the way organic material does in a warmer climate. Just like food in a home freezer, it had been safe from the bacteria that would otherwise cause it to decay and be converted to CO2.

"However, if you allow your food to defrost, eventually bacteria will eat away at it, causing it to decompose and release carbon dioxide," researcher Aron Stubbins, from the University of Georgia Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, said in a statement. "The same thing happens to permafrost when it thaws."

Scientists have long feared that as the world gets warmer, thawing permafrost may lead to a significant effect on global warming. That's because according to estimates, there is more than 10 times the amount of carbon in Arctic soil than has been put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

In other words, there is two and a half times more carbon locked away in the Arctic than there is in the atmosphere today.

And now, climate change is not only melting Arctic sea ice, but also the Arctic's deep freezer, threatening to release massive amounts of long-frozen carbon into the environment.

"The study we did was to look at what happens to that organic carbon when it is released," Stubbins said. "Does it get converted to carbon dioxide or is it still going to be preserved in some other form?"

To find out, Stubbins and his colleagues studied thawed permafrost near the Kolyma River at Duvanni Yar in Siberia. The researchers measured the carbon concentration, how old the carbon was, and what forms of carbon were present in the water. After adding local microbes to water samples, two weeks later they measured the changes in the carbon concentration and composition, as well as the amount of CO2 that had been produced. (Scroll to read on...)