associated emissions<\/a>, which are estimated to be equivalent to those of Japan.<\/p>\nThe company just completed the first test of its insulating blankets in Canada\u2019s Northwest Territories at an area of rapidly eroding permafrost known as a retrogressive thaw slump. These slumps occur when a hill of permafrost thaws and collapses, enabling erosion to take big bites out of the landscape. This exposes deeper layers of soil to warming, forming hotspots of CO2 and methane emissions. One estimate suggests that these areas of rapid erosion could amplify permafrost emissions by as much as 40% compared to models that only account for gradual thaw.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s approach is to stabilize the edge of the slumps with a layer of wood shavings, soil and native seeds, and a burlap-like mat of coconut husks. Culha says she got the idea after hearing about Indigenous communities in Alaska that prevent permafrost degradation by planting trees along the edges of slumps. Similar erosion-control blankets are used in temperate areas, but they haven\u2019t been used to insulate or stabilize permafrost until now, she says.<\/p>\n
PermaC has yet to release results from this year’stest. But the blanket seems to have halted erosion: over the Arctic summer, the edge of the slump without the blanket retreated by 5 metres, whereas the blanketed area saw no measurable retreat, Culha says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s very promising,\u201d says Christina Schaedel, a permafrost scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, who has been advising the company. However, the result is from only one slump over one summer, she adds.<\/p>\n
Green blanket<\/p>\n
One challenge is calculating how much CO2 the blankets prevent from being emitted. Measuring the CO2 emissions from slumps is not straightforward and remains an active research question, says Mark Lara, a biologist who studies permafrost landscapes at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. \u201cThere definitely are slumps that are spewing out carbon,\u201d he says. But there are \u201clots of minutiae that could dramatically impact the results\u201d, he adds. For instance, the emissions from any given slump depend on its geometry, the amount of carbon in the soil and how much of that carbon ends up as CO2 or methane after erosion.<\/p>\n
So far, Culha has only rough estimates for the emissions that the blankets might prevent. Extrapolating from research on erosion rates and soil carbon in the Arctic, she thinks that about 2,200 tonnes of CO2 a year might be prevented from being emitted at the average carbon-rich slump. If those calculations are accurate and the blankets can be installed at 20,000 slumps across Canada and Alaska \u2014 the company\u2019s ambitious goal over the next decade \u2014 she estimates that they might prevent about 40 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year, roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of Hungary.<\/p>\n
Culha says the company is developing a detailed methodology that a third party could use to verify prevented emissions, which would be necessary for the company to sell carbon credits for emissions the blankets prevent. People could purchase those credits to offset emissions elsewhere. The firm aims to issue credits as soon as next year, and has so far raised Can$1.4 million (US$1 million) from investors, says Culha.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As permafrost thaws in the Arctic, a company wants to use blankets to prevent erosion of the landscape.Credit:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629184,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[390,75,273,22580,1928,1929,111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-629183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-engineering","tag-environment","tag-environmental-sciences","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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