But that protection is being undermined by climate change, which is warming the Arctic Ocean four times faster like the rest of the world. “In the undisturbed environment of the tundra ecosystem, permafrost is protected by vegetation-laden vegetation from the warm weather,” says climate expert Yaping Chen of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, lead author on a new paper. However, when the fire burns, it kills the plants and removes the organic matter’s protective properties, which eventually plunge the earth into the melting pot. ”
This allows the plants to dry more easily and giving them more opportunities to burn during the increasingly lightning storm. (Extreme heat means hot air is high in the atmosphere, that’s the way thunder clouds are madeExtreme temperatures due to climate change already cause melting which causes the thermokarst to melt, just as an ice cube melts slowly on your table. But wildfires are like lighting a flame of fire in the background.
To make matters worse, wildfires create darkness under the heat, so they are heated again More quickly in the sun. If the area reaches a certain level, a clean melt of ice is formed and expanded, as water also absorbs most of the sun’s rays. All the plants that were previously trapped in the ice will also sink to the bottom of the water hole, making it very dark.
Permafrost is basically a refrigerator of living things — and when it heats up and thaws, germs begin to multiply inside it, just as we can with your food once you remove your fridge. It is the microbes that chew in the millennium-old organic matter, producing methane, greenhouse gases. 80 times more than carbon dioxide. (If there is no standing water in thawed permafrost and when the crop dries, the insects emit CO.2 instead, but they are less common because craters tend to make smaller pools.)
“With thermokarst you show the depth and depth of the ice to melt, more efficiently than non-thermokarst,” says astronomer Vladimir Romanovsky, University of Alaska Fairbanks permafrost geophysicist, who did not participate. “Thermokarst method can convert previously dry areas into wetlands, and wetlands emit methane.”
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