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Permafrost is Thawing in the Arctic So Fast Scientists Lost Their Equipment

posted by mrpg on Sunday May 05 2019, @01:00AM   
from the this-worries-me dept.

janrinok writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Permafrost in some areas of the Canadian Arctic is thawing so fast that it's gulping up the equipment left there to study it.

"The ground thaws and swallows it," said Merritt Turetsky, a University of Guelph biologist whose new research warns the rapid thaw could dramatically increase the amounts of greenhouse gases released from ancient plants and animals frozen within the tundra.

"We've put cameras in the ground, we've put temperature equipment in the ground, and it gets flooded. It often happens so fast we can't get out there and rescue it.

"We've lost dozens of field sites. We were collecting data on a forest and all of a sudden it's a lake."

Turetsky's research, published this week in the journal Nature, looks at the rate of permafrost thaw across the Arctic and what its impact could be on attempts to limit greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

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Original Submission

• Re:Bad predictions Re:Bad predictions (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @03:55PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @03:55PM (#839252)

  I'm the one who posted that, and didn't post any others. Sorry, more than one person exists who is skeptical of the conclusions of researchers whose understanding of their chosen topic is so poor they can't even keep track of their equipment.

  This story reminds me of that "doomsday vault" that flooded when the ice they built it inside of melted. It was meant to preserve seeds from the dangers of climate change for thousands of years but they didn't anticipate a bit of melting ice.

  It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.

  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-stronghold-of-worlds-seeds-flooded-after-permafrost-melts [theguardian.com]

  You can see when it comes time to apply their theories about the climate to the real world they always fail epically. Just like the "dirty snowball" comet hypothesis. It is all fun and games until you need to use the theory to guess how hard the surface will be to land your probe on it, then the probe bounces off because it was rock, not ice.

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• Re:Bad predictions (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @04:05PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @04:05PM (#839258)

  Or all these boats that get stuck in the ice because they listened to false predictions of "ice free":

  https://dailycaller.com/2016/07/20/global-warming-expedition-stopped-in-its-tracks-by-arctic-sea-ice/ [dailycaller.com]

  I can't think of a single useful prediction made by the entire field, only bad ones that lead to problems. But there must be at least a few made, even if on accident.

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