Scientists have found evidence that the Asian continent was free of permafrost all the way to its northerly coast with the Arctic Ocean when Earth’s average temperature was 4.5˚ C warmer than today, suggesting that the whole Northern Hemisphere would have also been free of permafrost at the time.
Scientists have found evidence that the Asian continent was free of permafrost all the way to its northerly coast with the Arctic Ocean when Earth’s average temperature was 4.5˚ C warmer than today, suggesting that the whole Northern Hemisphere would have also been free of permafrost at the time.
The stark findings indicate that if average global temperatures were to rise by this amount in the future, permafrost found in the Northern Hemisphere today would thaw.
Such a temperature increase would release up to 130 billion tonnes of carbon currently frozen in the ground over the coming decades.
The international team of researchers, which included experts from Northumbria and Oxford universities in the UK, Bern University in Switzerland, Geological Surveys of Israel and of the United States, came to this conclusion after studying more than 60 mineral deposits obtained from caves in the Lena River delta region of north-eastern Siberia.
Read more at Northumbria University
Image: Researchers at Siberia's Taba-Ba’astakh cliffs looking for samples to analyse. (Credit: Sasha Osinzev)
