Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought."Vast expanses of peatland in frozen soil across northern Europe are expected to pass a climatic tipping point far sooner than previously thought, threatening to release billions of tonnes of carbon that would accelerate climate change."
Sources: Nature Climate Change, NewScientist, 2022
Vast expanses of peatland in frozen soil across northern Europe are expected to pass a climatic tipping point far sooner than previously thought, threatening to release billions of tonnes of carbon that would accelerate climate change.Global warming has already caused Arctic permafrost to start releasing more carbon than it absorbs. But Richard Fewster at the University of Leeds, UK, and his colleagues have pinpointed in new detail when and where local climates will become unsuitable for peatland locked away in permafrost.
Finland, Norway, Sweden and a small part of north-west Russia will become too warm for permafrost peatland by the 2040s in all possible future carbon emissions scenarios considered by the team, compared with 2070 as thought previously. In the three higher-emission scenarios, most of Western Siberia will pass the same threshold in the 2090s.
This would leave 39.5 billion tonnes of carbon, twice the amount contained in Europe’s forests, at risk of being released into the atmosphere and turbocharging climate change. The vast majority of that carbon is locked up in western Siberia, which has much older and larger peatlands than the other areas included in the study.
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