{"id":52305,"date":"2018-08-30T08:53:04","date_gmt":"2018-08-30T15:53:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/?p=52305"},"modified":"2018-08-30T16:45:40","modified_gmt":"2018-08-30T23:45:40","slug":"schuur-permafrost-thaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/schuur-permafrost-thaw\/","title":{"rendered":"‘What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic:’ NAU’s Schuur discusses dangers of thawing permafrost"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Ted<\/a>
Ted Schuur and permafrost research monitoring equipment. Eight Mile Lake Study Area, Bonanza Creek LTER. Healey, AK. Photo credit: Thomas Nash<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For decades at field stations across the Arctic, permafrost researchers like Northern Arizona University\u2019s Ted Schuur<\/strong> have walked up to pipes drilled into the frozen ground and, with highly sensitive thermometers attached to cables, taken the Earth\u2019s temperature.<\/p>\n

Recently, their measurements suggest that even meters below the Earth\u2019s surface, the state of permafrost\u2014a once-permanently frozen layer of soil, vegetation and ice\u2014may no longer be permanent. As this layer warms, microbes awaken and release large stores of carbon dioxide and methane into the world\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Schuur, who\u2019s received a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to establish a carbon observatory at Eight Mile Lake near Denali National Park in Alaska, calls the permafrost\u2019s massive release of greenhouse gases into the Earth\u2019s atmosphere a \u201cwild card,\u201d and potentially a tipping point, for the global climate.<\/p>\n

Like the point at which ice becomes water, certain thresholds yield dramatic consequences when they\u2019re crossed. The permafrost at the observatory site in Alaska\u2019s interior hovers just below zero degrees Celsius, potentially on the verge of rapid change. This makes it a good bellwether for Schuur to measure shifts and trends in this cycle.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s so interesting about Eight Mile Lake is that it\u2019s at this point where the permafrost is about to go through the biggest threshold change,\u201d Schuur said. \u201cWe imagine large parts of the Arctic doing that in the future. So, it seemed like a good place to ask the question, \u2018What\u2019s going to happen to all the carbon?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The five-year NSF grant will help Schuur\u2019s team answer that question. Part of the NSF\u2019s Navigating the New Arctic<\/a> initiative, the grant is offered through the Long Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB) program, which supports researchers who have already collected six years of continuous data. Using these parameters, LTREB grants are designed to support important scientific questions that require a longer timeline\u2014often decades\u2014to answer.<\/p>\n

And a report earlier this month from north of the Arctic Circle has injected these permafrost questions with new urgency. According to National Geographic<\/a>, a team of ecologists in Cherskiy, Russia, reported that sections of permafrost soils it studies never refroze this winter.<\/p>\n

Though the Cherskiy field station does not have decades of continuous data to underpin this new finding, their observations match others made in elsewhere in the Arctic. Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost researcher at University of Alaska, Fairbanks, also observed two sites near Fairbanks where the permafrost soil failed to freeze again this year.<\/p>\n

“This is really a very important threshold,” Romanovsky told National Geographic.<\/p>\n

Schuur agrees.<\/p>\n

“This is a big deal,”\u00a0he told the magazine. “In the permafrost world, this is a significant milestone in a disturbing trend\u2014like carbon in the atmosphere reaching 400 parts per million.”<\/p>\n

When the permafrost thaws, now-frozen carbon can enter the atmosphere as greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, affecting climate everywhere on Earth. Or, as a video from the NSF\u2019s new Arctic initiative warns, \u201cWhat happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"NAU<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kate Petersen | Center for Ecosystem Science and Society
\n(928) 523-2982 | kate.petersen@nau.edu<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For decades at field stations across the Arctic, permafrost researchers like Northern Arizona University\u2019s Ted Schuur have walked up to pipes drilled into the frozen ground and, with highly sensitive thermometers attached to cables, taken the Earth\u2019s temperature. Recently, their measurements suggest that even meters below the Earth\u2019s surface, the state of permafrost\u2014a once-permanently frozen…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":52307,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-academics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}