AFP _ Global Warming Time Bomb in Arctic Soil

In a news release by Agence France-Presse, a study has found that Arctic soil contains 60% more trapped Greenhouse Gas than previously thought. American scientists discovered the increase, via extensive testing of 117 sample sites from North America, taken at depths of one metre.

This GHG is presently trapped inside a blanket of frozen permafrost covering one fifth of the world’s land mass.

The Nobel Prize-winning UN panel of climate change scientists project temperature increases by century’s end of up to six degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Arctic region, which is more sensitive to global warming than any other part of the planet.

Commenting on the research, Christian Beer of the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, pointed out that the climate change models upon which future projections are based, do not include the potential impact of the gases trapped frozen Arctic soils.

“Releasing even a portion of this carbon into the atmosphere, in the form of methane or carbon dioxide, would have an significant impact on Earth’s climate,” he noted in his commentary, also published in Nature Geoscience.

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