Climate warning as Siberia melts

THE world’s largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.

The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

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What was until recently a featureless expanse of frozen peat is turning into a watery landscape of lakes, some more than a kilometre across. Kirpotin suspects that some unknown critical threshold has been crossed, triggering the melting.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725124.500

Michiel

 michielkalkman@gmail.com  

1 thought on “Climate warning as Siberia melts

  • Oops, that’s scary – And STILL the Americans won’t sign Kyoto or anything that would actually start to stem the damage being done to the environment…

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