How can thawing permafrost be used to reverse one of the primary drivers of climate change? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated how thawing permafrost could combat one of the primary drivers of climate change. This study has the potential to help scientists discover natural ways for combating climate change, as the latter continues ravaging the planet with increased temperatures and more extreme weather events.
For the study, the researchers examined changes in carbon dioxide (CO2) levels within the rivers of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, which represents the largest continuous expanse of permafrost outside the Earth’s poles. The primary motivation behind the study was to challenge longstanding climate models and hypotheses that melting permafrost was a source of CO2, which is a primary driver of climate change.
After combining this data with data collected from several dozen rovers across Asia, the team discovered that carbon numbers dropped from thawing permafrost. While regions that have continuous permafrost experienced 15 percent of the CO2 emissions, regions with sporadic permafrost often experienced nearly full compensation for CO2 emissions. While this seems promising, the researchers note this does not indicate that human-caused climate change could be counteracted by natural processes like thawing permafrost.
“Unfortunately, the answer is no,” said Dr. Aaron Bufe, who is a Professor of Sedimentology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a co-author on the study. “Annual CO2 emissions by humans are about 100-times greater than the amount of CO2 sequestered by weathering. A bit of an increase in weathering rates with permafrost thaw will not affect this huge difference. The most helpful thing for us to do would be to drastically reduce emissions.”
What new insights into thawing permafrost and CO2 emissions will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: Nature, EurekAlert!