July 2021 has been marked as the hottest month ever registered. It is a direct consequence of climate change, one of the biggest problems we are facing now. It causes many issues such as heatwaves, wildfires, floods, and ice melting, but more issues are appearing one after another such as permafrost thawing. Before scientists were really concerned about the ice melting in the arctic. Now they are even more concerned about the ice melting on earth -permafrost.
What is permafrost? According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (NRDC), permafrost is a geological term that refers to “any type of ground—from soil to sediment to rock—that has been frozen continuously for a minimum of two years and as many as hundreds of thousands of years. It can extend down beneath the earth’s surface from a few feet to more than a mile—covering entire regions, such as the Arctic tundra, or a single, isolated spot, such as a mountaintop of alpine permafrost.” Permafrost represents 20% of the earth’s surface and is mostly situated in Greenland, Alaska, Canada, and Russia, where “permafrost occupies nearly 65% of the territory”, as reported by the Climate Change Post. That is why its melting is a big concern for the country. As the global temperature is rising, permafrost starts to melt at an alarming speed. According to Yale Environment 360 “some 2.5 million square miles of permafrost – 40 percent of the world’s total – could disappear by the end of the century”. Many scientists are concerned because a big part of it has not melted in thousands of years and is keeping imprisoned things that could affect our planet.
In fact, permafrost is already causing many problems in Russia. For instance, the ground is starting to collapse in some places, forming holes and craters. Some of them have a length of 1km and are 100 meters deep, like the one found in Batagaika, Russia. As stated by Russia Beyond, it looks so extraordinary that “locals call the Batagaika fault the ‘Gates of Hell’ and sometimes refer to it as “a door to the otherworld”. These craters appear in places sparsely populated by humans, so it doesn’t cause much danger. However, when the permafrost starts melting under cities, it engenders serious problems. Many buildings in Russia are collapsing because previously they were built on solid ground (permafrost) but now the ground becomes softer and unstable. For example, due to this issue in Norilsk, Russia, “the largest city in the world built on permafrost” and “home to 180,000 people” according to Arctic Today, “about 60 percent of the houses have been damaged by permafrost thaw, and one in 10 have been abandoned”. As a result, 10% of the population was forced to abandon their homes due to safety concerns.
The next problem to face – permafrost contains mercury, about 1.5 million tons of it, which is 2/3 of all the mercury on Earth. Mercury is a very toxic substance and if released due to the permafrost thawing the consequences can be dreadful for people’s health because it can lead to severe intoxications, paralysis, mental disorders, and, in the worst case, even death.
Another concerning thing found by scientists in permafrost is the presence of ancient and unknown viruses. Recently researchers found new types of viruses aged thousands of years, previously unknown. Luckily, they turned out to be harmless but we cannot be sure about the other ones, still imprisoned by permafrost. In Russia, in 2016, a bacterium called “bacillus anthracis” that disappeared in the 1940s resurfaced due to the melting of permafrost. It has become the cause of a big infection of anthrax. This disease killed 2000 hundreds of animals and even one human as reported in Nature Scientific Report.
As we can see, the permafrost thawing is causing many problems in Russia and other northern countries. However, this issue has also important consequences on a global scale, because permafrost is liberating huge amounts of greenhouse gases that accumulate in the atmosphere. It happens because microorganisms get access to organic waste due to the ice melting and release greenhouse gases, mostly methane and carbon dioxide. According to the Good planet foundation, “permafrost could emit an average of 1.5 billion tons of greenhouse gases each year for the next 100 years.”. If these gases continue to go out in the atmosphere at the present speed, the temperature will rise tremendously, affecting our planet and us. And it will become a vicious circle because gases will increase the temperature of the earth, the hotter the earth is, the more permafrost melts, the more gas will be released, and so on.
In order to face this problem, the Russian government has been taking some measures because as Vladimir Putin said “Moscow saw things like melting permafrost as a threat”. To tackle this problem, all the infrastructure located in areas near permafrost that are prone to cause its melting was forced to do a check-up. Moreover, oil pipelines in Siberia are starting to be built off the ground so that the heat does not help the melting of permafrost as well. The problem is that these measures are unfortunately far from enough to stop this issue. That is why all the countries need to take this matter into consideration and help to stop the permafrost from melting. The only way to fix it is by taking significant measures together because it is our duty to protect the planet we live on!
Sources:
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/permafrost-everything-you-need-know
https://www.climatechangepost.com/russia/permafrost/
https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/332583-yakutia-batagaika-crater
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72440-6
Written by: Sonia Demidova