Global Permafrost Soils Hold More Than Twice The CO2 Now Contained In Atmosphere - AFP

Permafrost blanketing the northern hemisphere contains more than twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, making it a potentially mammoth contributor to global climate change depending on how quickly it thaws. o concludes a group of nearly two dozen scientists in a paper appearing this week in the journal Bioscience. The lead author is Ted Schuur, an associate professor of ecology at the University of Florida.

Previous studies by Schuur and his colleagues elsewhere have estimated the carbon contained in permafrost in northeast Siberia. The new research expands that estimate to the rest of the permafrost-covered northern latitudes of Russia, Europe, Greenland and North America. The estimated 1,672 billion metric tons of carbon locked up in the permafrost is more than double the 780 billion tons in the atmosphere today. "It's bigger than we thought," Schuur said.

Permafrost is frozen ground that contains roots and other soil organic matter that decompose extremely slowly. When it thaws, bacteria and fungi break down carbon contained in this organic matter much more quickly, releasing it to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide or methane, both greenhouse gases.

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For this new paper, scientists combined an extensive database of measurements of carbon content in different types of permafrost soils with the estimated spatial extent of those soils in Russia, Europe, Greenland and North America. Schuur said the researchers estimated the carbon contained in permafrost to a depth of three meters, two meters deeper than many earlier estimates. Although permafrost depths vary greatly with location, basing the estimate on three-meter depth "better acknowledges the true size of the permafrost carbon pool," Schuur said. The new estimate is important because it mirrors other climate change science suggesting that at a certain tipping point, natural processes could contribute significant amounts of greenhouse gases, supplementing human-influenced, industrial processes that release fossil fuel carbon, Schuur said.

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http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Thawing_Permafrost_Holds_Vast_Carbon_Pool_999.html

there is this as well... peat moss:

By volume there is about 4 trillion m³ of peat in the world covering a total of around 2% of global land mass (about 3 million km²), containing about 8 billion terajoules of energy.

http://www.co2-handel.de/print_4045.html

”Peat stores one third of the global carbon reserves, and also enormous amounts of the greenhouse gas methane. If – or rather when – the average temperature on the earth rises by one centigrade, large amounts of these reserves could be released to the atmosphere. If that happens, the worst case scenario is that it no longer matters what humans do. The climatic changes may have gone out of control," Professor Stenøien says.

and the fact that methane hydrates would contribute 20 times as much damage to the envirnoment some dumb fuckers are trying to figure how to mine it from the continental shelves of the USA as an energy source.

Sample link to the subject here : http://www.springerlink.com/content/pn31475q37871408/

I knew about this in 1983 through a University Class partially taught by Professors,Nasa Employees/researchers. Duh. I have been worrying a long time about this.

:party:

We shud all b3 h4pp3ez!!