Is the Artic Permafrost Thawing?

 

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Down Under is enjoying a comfortably cool winter. Because of La Niña, this year has been relatively rainy too, which means that crops were abundant. The bad news is that plenty water and food also means mice galore.

But the really terrible thing is that rain over the Murray-Darling Basin makes the rats go berserk.

Perhaps all that, plus the obsession with COVID19 (now with the Delta variant scaring the living daylights out of Victorians and New South Welshmen and -women), has kept local media too busy.

Whatever the cause, local journos have all but ignored the ongoing heat wave affecting almost the entire northern hemisphere since the last week of June (see image above, courtesy of The Washington Post). Here we’ve only heard about the western states of the US and Canada, where the heat has killed hundreds of people.

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On top, NASA is currently reporting wildfires in British Columbia (June 30):

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The Sakha Republic (Eastern Russian Federation, July 5):

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And the northwestern coast of the US (July 8):

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This map shows the relative locations of those fires:

And local Russian media in English reports that

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It’s not only physical structures and economic activity which are at risk either, according to Staalesen’s story: “With the melting of the frozen tundra comes also growing risks of new and lethal diseases. Among the many infectious disease agents preserved in the permafrost is Anthrax.”

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Before closing. Yesterday (Friday July 16th) ABC Online published the following extremely disturbing story (from the international news agency Agence France-Presse):

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The AFP release itself provides little detail on the research it comments on and yesterday I could not verify any of what little information AFP made available. Only today, therefore too late for this post, I found a note at The Guardian providing more particulars.

The research paper (“Amazonia as a Carbon Source Linked to Deforestation and Climate Change”) appeared in Nature and was written by Luciana V. Gatti (from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research) and another 18 researchers. It is available for viewing here (not downloadable).

More on this soon, once I give it a good look.