The frozen soil under the tundra of West Siberia is home to millions of tonnes of CO2 and methane locked in the ice. Methane is a gas that has around 25 times as power a greenhouse effect as carbon dioxide. By 2005, the melting permafrost was releasing 100,000 tonnes of methane a day. These emissions contribute more to global warming than the US's net CO2 emissions.  

An article in The Economist's issue of this week describes how the tundra will be soon a closely studied ecosystem, owing to its impact on climate change. Its vast reserves of CO2 and methane will be a collosal driving force of global warming, known as a "feedback effect". As global warming takes its course, more permafrost melts, releasing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of methane and CO2 into the atmosphere and therefore causing a greater global temperature increase, and in turn a more accelerated melting of permafrost.

Permafrost is liquefying at an alarming rate and had never melted until now. The solid mix of peat and ice contains a difficult to estimate amount of CO2 and methane within an area of around a million square kilometers (approx the size of France and Germany combined) and a depth of hundreds of meters. The amounts of GHG gases contained are more than significant. However the alarming note is that none of these is taken into account in the [rather conservative] climate change predictions of the IPCC.

Brunella

www.carbonica.org