What happens when permafrost thaws
Credit: Vladimir Romanovsky
It’s the ground that stays frozen for eons, in places reaching 1,000 feet deep.
Permafrost: the Far North’s fragile bedrock. But can it also serve as a harbinger of long-term climate change?
Though it grows during low-snow winters, it warms during summer. The natural heat from within the Earth eats away at its floor. Near the surface, permafrost may fail to recover when deep snow insulates it from winter chill.
Charting its future can be complicated, says Alaska’s permafrost man Vladimir Romanovsky, requiring decades of data before researchers can sort out its cryptic trends.
Romanovsky — one of the world’s leading permafrost experts at the University of Alaska Fairbanks — plans to expand monitoring across the North with more than $1.8 million in two grants from the National Science Foundation. Some of the work will be part of Thermal State of Permafrost project for the International Polar Year, while other aspects will help tune up a sophisticated climate prediction model.
Permafrost distribution: Pink is continuous,
blue is discontinuous, green is sporatic.
Vladimir Romanovksy 2002
“The major idea is to try to measure during this two or three year time frame the maximum amount of boreholes and have this snapshot in time and use it as a way to measure future change,” Romanovsky said in a telephone interview. “Even if it’s just three years, it’s still very good … to establish some kind of snapshot, a snapshot of permafrost situation. And it’s not just Russia and Alaska. It’s the whole Arctic and Antarctic.”
With a $945,000 NSF grant for the Russian project, Romanovsky hopes tap into the extensive network of boreholes across Siberia — helping Russian permafrost researchers reactivate former observatories that gradually went offline during years of low funding since the Soviet Union broke up. Romanovsky also hopes to compile as much older data as possible.
“We’ve already supplied about 60 sets of equipment,” he said this week. “I hope that by the end of this summer we will have about 100 holes.”
At the same time, Romanovsky will use a different $915,000 NSF grant to launch a climate model to map permafrost changes in Greenland and Alaska — linking weather and permafrost measurements at locales already undergoing climate change.
“Greenland is actually a separate project, formally not in IPY,” he said. “It’s a little bit larger in terms of scientific scope. … (The intent is to) try to see how permafrost will react to these changes in climate.”
Romanovsky may be uniquely qualified to bridge North American and Russian permafrost science. Born in Russia, and a former hockey defense-man for Moscow State University, Romanovsky has two Ph.Ds in geology and the physics of frozen ground, buttressed by extensive academic work in Russian and English in math and geophysics.
“It does seem like I have a pretty good advantage, simply because of my background,” he said. “In Russia, the permafrost community is much larger than in the United States. I know pretty much everybody, personally or through their publications.”
Thawing permafrost creates another
‘drunken forest’ near Fairbanks
Credit: Vladimir Romanovsky
Now a naturalized U.S. citizen raising two boys in what passes for suburbia outside Fairbanks (in a neighborhood chock full of warming permafrost and occasional sinkholes), Romanovsky has become one UAF’s leading researchers, head of the permafrost lab at the Geophysical Institute and International Arctic Research Center.
The latest Alaska data suggests local permafrost has hardly changed during the past five years, despite warmer air temperatures and weather patterns that have been shrinking sea ice and triggering forest fires.
“For the North Slope, we have, for the last five years, seen practically no change,” Romanovsky said. “It’s still a couple of degrees warmer than it was (decades ago), but it’s not really warming.”
At the same time, permafrost in the Interior forests away from roads and buildings and disturbed land has warmed and cooled, depending on snow depth.
“Snow is very important,” Romanovsky said.
Permafrost thawing destroyed a
four-story apartment building in Yakutia
Credit: Vladimir Romanovsky
Still, permafrost that has been exposed by development, or heated by foundations, continues to degrade rapidly. Evidence can be seen outside Fairbanks and in towns across Siberia.
If the Far North climate continues to warm as projected by some models — and snow depths cooperate — permafrost could eventually start to thaw on a large scale. Boreal forests could sag, with yawning sinkholes and toppling “drunken” trees. Foundations could crack and roads buckle. Tundra lakes could drain. Ancient carbon could seep into the sky.
As a result, monitoring the health of northern permafrost has become one of the most critical tasks facing scientists trying to track Arctic climate change. Three years is a good start, Romanovksy said.
“Of course, I hope the Alaska science will continue to collect data, but for this global network there’s still a question,” he added. “This kind of effort is very difficult to keep running for the globe.”
[...] locales has slumped. But almost all of Alaska’s permanently frozen ground remains stable. To catch an updated glimpse of permafrost health, FNS talked to permafrost expert Vladimir Romanovsky this spring. The latest Alaska data suggests [...]