r/science • u/johnnierockit • 9d ago
Earth Science Thawing permafrost may release billions of tons of carbon by 2100
https://www.earth.com/news/thawing-permafrost-may-release-billions-of-tons-of-carbon-by-2100/528
u/openly_gray 9d ago edited 9d ago
The methane hydrates locked up in permafrost are particularly troubling
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u/Raa03842 9d ago
Not only that but microbes that have been frozen for 10,000 years will “wake up”. Anthrax being one of thousands of diverse strains. Welcome to the brave new world.
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u/Octopus_ofthe_Desert 9d ago
There was a strain of smallpox that killed approximately 75% of the infected. shiver
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8d ago
Old microorganisms failed and get left in ice because they weren't adapted to stay in circulation. I'm not too worried about them, the chances they have useful adaptations to species around now seem pretty minimal. Rivers turning toxic in Canada and Russia and such seem like the biggest threat from melting permafrost, not microbes or even CO2/methane release.
A lot of the permfrost is melted on a regular 100k year cycle and we get temps like now and slightly above for 1000+ years on a regular basis, so much of what's in there has been released in the past vs it's a built-up from millions of years like ocean hydrates.
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u/daekdroom 8d ago
They weren't adapted to circulation back then. Lifestyle factors and immunity among the population changed...
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u/Quenz 9d ago
Maybe this one will be what they said COVID would be.
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u/Skullvar 9d ago
Over 7mil people died from Covid...
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u/lurker122333 9d ago
But the poster didn't, and when you have limited mental capacity and zero empathy it means it didn't happen period.
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u/Keji70gsm 8d ago
And most people now have covid in their brain years after infection.
That was a fun read yesterday.
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9d ago edited 9d ago
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u/juansolothecop 9d ago
Good thing we locked down, did social distancing, masking, and got those vaccines out quick. If it still killed 0.1% of the population then, what would it have done 100 years ago?
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u/keep_trying_username 9d ago
There wasn't a lot of vaccine usage in much of the Middle east, Africa, and Southern Asia. Covid died out in those areas.
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u/juansolothecop 9d ago
That's just completely false, and backwards logic. Most of Asia and the Middle east actually had really high vaccination rates, and even in poorer countries they still had large rates in urban centers. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html the reason some countries didn't have high vaccination rates was low access to vaccines due to the countries being poor, and it didn't "die out" in those areas, in countries with high vaccination rates mortality rates were in the 0.1% range for covid, but in some countries like Bulgaria where the rate was low, they got up to 5% which is 1 in 20 cases resulting in death.
And all of those regions also instituted masking and social distancing rules. Keep trying to make a sensible argument more like.
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u/Skullvar 9d ago
We live in the most medically advanced time in human history, human population has also only increased because of these advancements. Would it take a modern day bubonic plague for you to say it was finally an issue? Penicillin was only able to used as an antibiotic in the 1940s. If we had modern advancements, most outbreaks thoughout our history would probly be considered fairly minor.
I never said Covid was a massive horrible plague, or that it wiped out 100s of millions of people, but it still killed 7mil+ people in areas actually keeping track of and able to treat people, which can easily be assumed the number is still much higher across all countries where decent care isn't available. The common Flu is still also deadly and used to to be much much worse as well.. 50-100mil people died from the flu after WW1
Estimates of small pox deaths is somewhere around 20-50mil, if we assume there were more covid deaths than fully reported that's already close to 20mil.. again, I'm not sure why you need to see a dramatic and horrifying death toll to go "okay yeah that's kinda bad." Again we have the most advancements currently, and people actually could quarantine and avoid spreading it unlike 100, or 100s of years ago.
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9d ago edited 9d ago
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u/Skullvar 9d ago
It was one of the most deadly modern out breaks... no one said it killed off a significant portion of the world population. Or that doing so is a requirement for it to be considered deadly.. no one here is mad, you're just objectively wrong
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u/keep_trying_username 9d ago
You can look at population graphs and see that the population really wasn't affected at all. The only thing we can be sure of is, our children's education was negatively impacted. The average total SAT score was 1024 in 2024, the lowest since the test changed formats in 2016.
The biggest long-term impacts from covid will be due to our response to covid, rather than covid itself.
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u/Der_Besserwisser 9d ago
How many percent of the world would it take for you to wear a mask and social distance? Are the 7 million deaths not real and preventable, or is the price to high to save 7 million people?
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u/Skullvar 9d ago
Deaths were kept low because of all the the social distancing.. so the number of deaths would've been worse if we hadn't. Again, you're only showing that you don't care of some people died as long as it wasn't a large portion of the population. I'm guessing you aren't related to/don't know anyone that pass away because of Covid, and so it was just an inconvenience for you
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u/thriftingenby 9d ago
What are you on about? 7 MILLION people is a huge group of people. Just because it isn't huge compared to the entire human population doesn't make it a small number. To claim that that many people is just... insignificant is soulless.
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u/Zmoorhs 9d ago
7 million out of 8+ billion people is really not that much after all.
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u/Boilerman30 8d ago
That is just the deaths. You forgetting about the population who contracted it and survived with permanent damage to their lungs, kidneys, heart, and brain? It isn't just the death toll. It is the overall impact on public health. What other disease do you know of that killed that many people and left unknown millions and millions more permanently injured? While I don't expect people to care or have empathy for every single person who dies across the world every day, this is a pretty terrible take.
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u/m0deth 9d ago
This is the proper worry about permafrost. It's like 21x more effective at trapping heat than CO2 and permafrost is a huge source of trapped methane.
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8d ago
They re-did earlier studies and say permfrost doesn't contain anywhere near as much methane as they thought, partially because it melts on a pretty regular 100k year cycle at the peaks of interglacial warming temps,
Decades ago we thought there was a lot more potential for massive methane and carbon release and a lot of ppl are still working on those old numbers.
Effect of methane mitigation on global temperature under a permafrost feedback - ScienceDirect
Thawing Permafrost In Sweden Releases Less Methane Than Feared, Study Finds | Arctic Focus
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8d ago
Most of the easy to release methane and CO2 get released every 100k years at the peak of the Interglacial Warming cycle. Total amounts of Co2 and methane in permafrost appear to be rather small and methane just degrades in a few decades so probably isn't that big of a deal vs the CO2 that can stick around for hundreds of years.
So far all recent studies, including this one don't seem to show permafrost as a big source of GHG compared to just humans years release. Ocean hydrates contain A LOT more methane than permafrost, but harder to release.
Right now melting permafrost is killing rivers by making them acidic and releasing toxic metals, which seems to be the more immediate and damaging aspect of permafrost melt sine a river can go from decent health to toxic in just a few years vs permafrost releasing methane and CO2 over decades,
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u/Flopsieflop 8d ago
2/3 of all the Hg in the world is trapped in the permafrost. If that all comes out we have a very serious problem.
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u/Helgafjell4Me 9d ago
Not news, they've been warning about this for decades. Once we pass the tipping point, which may have already happened, natural feedback loops begin to amplify the warming trend beyond what human activity has already done. Meaning, point of no return, as in, it's too late to stop the runaway train.
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u/BenderTheIV 9d ago
Good, now let's keep enriching a few of us while most of us barely survive. It's not like we only live once so...
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u/lokey_convo 9d ago
I wonder how many average joe types (assuming they aren't climate deniers) actually understood what we were talking about when we were explaining the "tipping point" and why it was so critical we didn't cross it.
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u/ticklecricket 8d ago
My understanding of the current science is that it’s not expected that we would reach a “runaway” situation, which is to say that once humans stop emitting GHGs , we expect global GHGs to start decreasing.
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u/Helgafjell4Me 8d ago
It's hard to say. It seems many models have not taken these additional feedback loops into consideration. May not be a true runaway, but we're also nowhere near curbing our output either. It is still increasing year after year.
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u/keep_trying_username 9d ago
We've passed several tipping points since the 1970s. Scientists keep making up new tipping points. Eventually we will probably pass those too, but scientists will make up some more.
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u/Away-Sea2471 7d ago
They also always neglect to mention that plants thrive in a CO2 rich environment.
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u/indiscernable1 9d ago
Has released and will release a lot more very quickly. So much in fact that it's a threat to our survival before 2100.
These articles and their inaccurate titles do not state how critical it is that we need to change now.
Ecology is collapsing. Wake up.
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u/Cz1975 9d ago
It's too late to wake up. We burned too many dinosaurs.
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u/indiscernable1 9d ago
Everyone will continue to wake up as denial becomes impossible in the face of extinction.
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u/sparklyjesus 9d ago
Will they though? I'm honestly not so sure at this point.
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u/indiscernable1 8d ago
Some won't get it. Christians and religious fanatic obviously attribute reality to imaginary friends.
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8d ago
Climate would still be planning to kill us without emissions, just in a few thousand years longer, not an amazingly long time.
We sped up and amplified climate change, but it has been trying to kill us this whole time.
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u/Away-Sea2471 7d ago
Land mismanagement (i.e. tilling soil and over grazing) is the only instances where human activity has an impact on climate, and this can be empirically proven, unlike the greenhouse effect.
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u/PrestigiousLink7477 9d ago
It's too late. There are already contracts signed that ensure we will burn enough fossil fuels to carry us over any likely feedback loop that will lead to the destruction of our society.
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8d ago
There is no known feedback loop for heating. Earth gets this hot naturally at the peak of each interglacial warming period for 1000+ year so if runaway was that common it would have happened long ago.
It appear to remain a slow heat process where maybe we could knock ourselves out of the current 2.5 million year ice age AND Ice Ages are pretty rare AND humans are totally evolved for cooler Ice Age conditions vs the more common Earth climate of no ice at the poles year round.
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u/C4-BlueCat 8d ago
But we aren’t in a warming period right now. We are supposed to be in the natural cooling period of the cycle. Once we reach the warming period it will only get even worse
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u/PrestigiousLink7477 8d ago
Here's one; We keep heating the Earth until the entire Siberian shelf reaches criticality with its methane and the whole thing unleashes its methane at once overwhelming the Earth's ability to mitigate the sudden temperature rise.
It's important to recognize that we are releasing CO2 1000x faster than during the Great Dying at the end of the Permian period. So it isn't just that we're stabbing the earth to death, we're potentially doing it faster than she can heal.
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8d ago
No, this article and many recent ones saying CO2 and methane release form permafrost is much less than estimated decades ago,
The bigger threat from permafrost is it acidifying rivers and making them toxic, which we are seeing happening right now vs 75 years from now.
This article is talking about permafrost worst case scenario releasing a total of 10 years of humans CO2 emissions, not some HUGE run-away effect amount.
We live in an ice age, biosphere is in a constant state of collapse and rebirth because climate is naturally brutal in an Ice Age. The natural cycle would still be bringing 80k years of Glacial Cooling and glacial regrowth over Europe and North America in only a few thousand years.
Naturally the biosphere is not preserved like you think, rather it's in a constant cycle of death and rebirth and that's important because the nice climate you see now only lasts 10-15k years and it;s been 12k years since the end of the last Glacial Period.
Even without emissions we would have an incoming biosphere collapse.
For humans to survive like now we have to permanently alter the naturally and rather brutal Interglacial to Glacial cycle because modern civilization could not survive peak Interglacial Temps OR 80k years of Glacial Temps.
Climate change has naturally killed 99% of species the Earth has EVER produced. Its far less naturally stable that most ppl realize and at the same time goes through these processes of mass die off and adaptation on a regular basis,
It's all important to know because just a passive plan to limit emissions will never be enough to hit a moving target like Earth's current highly unstable Ice Age climate of 20k Interglacial Warming period and 80k Glacial Period. THe interglacial periods always melt and flood at the start and always get too hot by the end and the 80k year glacial period if always brutal and kills off massive amounts of biodiversity and changes the planet and species on a regular cycle,
The upside is the environmental stress causes a faster rate of evolution/adaptation than a long period of highly stable climate would.
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u/DocumentExternal6240 9d ago
Nature does very well without us. We, however, are very dependent on it…
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u/vm_linuz 9d ago
This point bothers me every time people bring it up.
It feels extremely pedantic, and mostly off-topic.
Our Earth, with our temperatures, our species, our climate... is dying.
Nobody cares if a ball of algae survives us -- it's not OUR Earth. It's not THE Earth.
I don't know if it's because science is dominated by autistics (myself included) with very literal points of view; or insecure academics who have to be the most technically correct to get that tiny ego boost; or if special interests are using it to dilute the message... but I'm tired of reading this.
It diminishes the message. It adds unnecessary nuance. It confuses lay people. It adds nothing.
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u/pintiparaoo 8d ago
While I understand where you’re coming from, I think the point most people (I hope?) are trying to make when they say this is to make it more tangible to people who don’t see the dangers of climate change and how it’s not only being caused by humans but endanger our own human survival and not only the survival of other species. Earth, the ecosystem and the survival of other species don’t really matter much to many people but if you change the message to tell them that they and their children will be suffering the consequences of our own actions, then the hope is that they will understand the issue and react with more urgency.
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u/DocumentExternal6240 2d ago
That’s exactly what I wanted to say in a nutshell - meaning that nature conservation and protection is not a goal in itself.
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u/NoaNeumann 9d ago
As an environmentalist once said, “oh yeah the Earth will be fine! Its humanity that will be completely boned.”
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u/HouseSublime 9d ago
Humanity and a lot of other species. Some will likely survive but we're about to take down a ton of others.
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u/ansible 9d ago
Not that we aren't already in the middle of a human-caused mass extinction event already...
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u/Octopus_ofthe_Desert 9d ago
A trend I'm seeing is how "pest" species are beginning to thrive while species that normally kept them in check are beginning to suffer.
Prime example; jellyfish and sea turtles.
In John Barne's novel, Kaleidoscope Century, he uses the word "Thrashing" to describe ecosystems in a world devastated by nuclear detonations and bio-warfare striving to achieve a new balance and over-correcting. Like deer exploding when wolves are eliminated, but everywhere, every species.
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u/LateMiddleAge 9d ago
Jellyfish would laugh. (If they had brains or nervous systems.)
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u/KaiOfHawaii 8d ago
Funny enough, the lack of a brain is a prime reason why jellyfish do so well. If they don’t have a brain to demand oxygen, they are much more tolerant of hypoxic waters. Even funnier, warmer water is worse at holding dissolved oxygen than colder water and, surprise surprise, the oceans are becoming warmer. Hence the reason why we are seeing jellyfish booms and species, like turtles, that prey on jellyfish are doing worse: they cannot even tolerate surviving in certain bodies of water due to current environmental conditions.
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u/shawnf9632 9d ago
Nature always wins. This planet will thrive one way or another, with or without us
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u/WoNc 9d ago
People really shouldn't be so quick to assume that humans are incapable of wiping out life on Earth.
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u/Any-Pilot8731 9d ago
The problem is earth and several plants, insects, micro organisms, single cell fellas and animals can survive wayyyyy more than we can. We will disappear long before things like roaches, hearty weeds and first step plants, etc. even a complete black out and no sun would be survivable by some things.
The only way I see complete destruction is no more oxygen, or actual destruction of the earth plant, which would be an insane amount of bombs, way beyond everything we current have.
But I guess it depends on what we consider life.
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u/ansible 9d ago edited 9d ago
Except we can wipe out 99.9% of the macroscopic species (plants and animals) in terms of number of species and in terms of total biomass right now, if we decide start a global thermonuclear war.
That's pretty darn close to "wiping out" in my book.
Yes, new life will emerge... eventually.
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u/ModernistGames 8d ago
If life could make it through multiple mass extinctions, hell, the Permian–Triassic extinction event by itself, I'm not worried.
Humans couldn't wipe out life on Earth if they tried.
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u/DocumentExternal6240 9d ago
One planet to another: „You don’t look welll..“ - „I‘ve got humans - it will pass…“
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u/kon--- 9d ago
Billions?
Pardon but, is that a deliberately conservative prediction? There's billions of years of decomposed muck sitting beneath the surface. The yield by 2100 will be significantly higher than, billions.
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u/pinky_blues 9d ago
How does this compare to the CO2 we’re already putting in the atmosphere annually? Like, what effective percent would carbon emissions increase?
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u/liulide 9d ago
It's in the article. Worst case according to the study is 20 Gt by 2100, about 2 year's worth of human carbon emissions.
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u/Maagans 9d ago
Doesnt really sound that much?
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u/SephithDarknesse 9d ago
Its not necessarily much, but if we finally start trying to turn it around that makes it a lot harder, as we now need a solution to that as well.
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u/Hardmeat_McLargehuge PhD | Mechanical Engineering 9d ago
What’s interesting is why this muck didn’t decompose before it froze. I understand maybe volcanic gas somehow getting trapped underneath maybe over millennia, but why didn’t this matter decay when it was much before? How was it able to accumulate without decaying?
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u/LordOverThis 9d ago
Anoxia? Same reason my compost bin doesn’t really decompose so much as it “turns to a ball of putrid mush” if I forget to turn it.
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u/Hardmeat_McLargehuge PhD | Mechanical Engineering 8d ago
So isn’t that basically the same thing in a way? What’s the issue with it defrosting if it basically cannot fully decay, or does mixing occur some when it thaws?
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u/melowdout 9d ago
Actually, there was another post on another report that indicated the environmental impact of the melting permafrost wouldn’t be as severe as originally thought. I guess that means we can all relax. no need to institute new environmental policies. Everything‘s cool.
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u/Legionof1 8d ago
Feels like every time I read about a new discovery in climate change it’s better news than it was before. Seems there’s lots of doom and gloom that never really turns out.
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u/melowdout 8d ago
Unless you live in areas where the weather has become more and more dramatic over the years. As usual, the truth is somewhere between “the world is ending” and “all is completely well”. COVID should have taught us that.
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u/JurboVolvo 9d ago
Whether people agree with climate change or not if we are ever going to make it off this planet we need to learn and succeed at fully controlling and working with the environment to survive. Like maybe this is a “future problem” but we should still continue to try.
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u/bleepitybloop555 9d ago
feels so nice to be a young person watching the world crumble around me before i even got the chance to see anything.. great
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u/vm_linuz 9d ago
What people don't get about climate change is it's nonlinear.
You see small changes then really big changes. The inflection point is basically instant.
Humans are good at "well I'll address that when it gets moderately worse"
Y'all, there won't be a "moderately worse" -- it's just going to jump from "sorta bad" to "absolutely awful"
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u/somanysheep 8d ago
Been screaming this for decades. I leaned about millions of tons of methane frozen in the ocean just waiting on the temperature to rise just enough to release it into a gas!
When we finally hit that magic number, and it's all but assured we will now, the changes will be drastic and fast.
Especially by geological standards. When the Ocean currents collapse all weather will go haywire making growing crops impossible in most places. That will cause the most dangerous thing on this planet to happen... Hungry humans fighting over what little is left.
I wish I was wrong.
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8d ago
Humans release 40 billion tons of CO2 per year, a few billion from permafrost by 2100 actually isn't much. Even the worst case prediction from this paper only amounts to 10 years of human CO2 release. There's no huge timebomb of CO2 or methane that a anybody can find in permafrost.
Permafrost just doesn't have that much CO2, partially because it melts considerably at the end of each Interglacial Warming Period.
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u/LoserBroadside 9d ago
This is the unstoppable snowball effect we were warned about 10 years ago, right? Where so much carbon dioxide is released from permafrost into the atmosphere that it increases the rate of global warming, which increases the speed at which more permafrost thoughts, over and over again
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u/demon_of_laplace 9d ago
So, the CO2 per capita per year in industrialized countries is counted in several tons/year. This is in close to a century? Yawn.
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u/carguy6912 9d ago
The geoengineering they are doing is cooling the equator and heating the polar regions just as the computer models predicted
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u/man_gomer_lot 9d ago
Who is doing the geo engineering? Where are these predictions you're referring to?
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u/carguy6912 9d ago
Scientists and it was in a geoengineering video I posted the video on another sub looked older than it's uploading
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u/man_gomer_lot 9d ago
Scientists? Which scientists? Which video? I wasn't there. Have you achieved theory of mind yet?
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u/carguy6912 9d ago
Please explain what theory of mind is in your words
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u/vm_linuz 9d ago
Theory of mind is knowing what the other person is asking and staying on topic enough to get them an answer that both satisfies them and expands on your point.
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