SOURCE: Climate Central
DATE: May 14th, 2017
SNIP: Alaska’s soils are taking far longer to freeze over as winter approaches than in previous decades, resulting in a surge in carbon dioxide emissions that could portend a much faster rate of global warming than scientists had previously estimated, according to new research.
Measurements of carbon dioxide levels taken from aircraft, satellites and on the ground show that the amount of CO2 emitted from Alaska’s frigid northern tundra increased by 70% between 1975 and 2015, in the period between October and December each year.
“A lot of models were predicting this thawing would happen, but not for another 50 to 100 years – we didn’t think it would happen this quickly,” said Roisin Commane, researcher at the Harvard John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and lead author of the report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.