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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday June 19 2019, @08:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-so-perma-frost dept.

Scientists Amazed as Canadian Permafrost Thaws 70 Years Early:

Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.

[...] With governments meeting in Bonn this week to try to ratchet up ambitions in United Nations climate negotiations, the... findings, published on June 10 in Geophysical Research Letters, offered a further sign of a growing climate emergency.

The paper was based on data Romanovsky and his colleagues had been analyzing since their last expedition to the area in 2016. The team used a modified propeller plane to visit exceptionally remote sites, including an abandoned Cold War-era radar base more than 300 km from the nearest human settlement.

Diving through a lucky break in the clouds, Romanovsky and his colleagues said they were confronted with a landscape that was unrecognizable from the pristine Arctic terrain they had encountered during initial visits a decade or so earlier.

The vista had dissolved into an undulating sea of hummocks - waist-high depressions and ponds known as thermokarst. Vegetation, once sparse, had begun to flourish in the shelter provided from the constant wind.

[...] Scientists are concerned about the stability of permafrost because of the risk that rapid thawing could release vast quantities of heat-trapping gases, unleashing a feedback loop that would in turn fuel even faster temperature rises.

No word on whether or not the Wicked Witch of the West had anything to do with it.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @05:44PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @05:44PM (#857532)

    And the subtext of TFS is "orange man bad".

    How do you get that?

    The subtext *I* got was. "Oh shit! things are rolling faster than we thought they would. We're fucked now."

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @06:15PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @06:15PM (#857547)

    Scientists' predictions not coming true, or arriving at contradictory results, is nothing new. I'm sure we all have heard scientists' opinions on what diet is most healthy at the current second. Yet it is palpable that, as soon as Trump was elected, if there was a global warming angle to be made with such a story it would receive more "airplay".