Natural History on the Big Screen – Feedback Loops: Permafrost
Air Date: July 14, 2021
Juliana Olsson:
All right. Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's conversation centered around the film, Climate Emergency - Feedback Loops: Permafrost, presented by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. My name is Juliana Olsson. I'm an exhibit writer and editor here at the museum, and I'll be moderating today's discussion. So, tonight's program is part three of the four-part Feedback Loop series that we're hosting this summer. These short films explore the various climate feedback loops across our forests, ocean, and atmosphere, and we're using them as launching points for conversations with leading climate scientists who will share their work and solutions for the future. For those of you who joined us for the previous Feedback Loops programs, welcome back. If you missed any of the previous sessions, like about forests and ice sheets, that's okay. You can find the recordings on our live video programs archive page, and we'll send a link out to that in the Q&A.
We hope you were able to watch the short film, Permafrost, before tonight's discussion, but if not, that's totally fine. We'll be sure to email you the link afterwards. And if you haven't already signed up, we'll drop another link in the Q&A box to the upcoming events in the series and send you a follow-up email after tonight's program with that information as well, so you will have all of your bases covered. So, speaking of the Q&A, this is where you'll be able to ask your questions to the panelists during the program, and where we'll share any relevant links mentioned during the conversation. So, the Q&A box is located at the bottom-center of the Zoom interface, so just go ahead and locate it. Before we get started, a few housekeeping notes. This discussion does offer closed captioning, so you can turn them off or on via the live transcript or CC button, which also should be located at the bottom of your Zoom interface.
Tonight's program will begin with a moderated conversation, and then we'll follow up with the chance to take your questions. But as you have questions, as they occur to you, just go ahead and submit them to the Q&A box. You don't have to wait until the end. Although you can't see all the questions coming in, we can, and we'll try to sort through as many as possible. And also, please let us know if your question is directed to a particular person or if it's for all of our panelists. So, with that, I'm going to get us started. I would like to go ahead and introduce our panelists, and have them turn on their videos and invite them all on screen here.
So, starting with Dr. Merritt Turetsky. She's the director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder. She's also one of the founding members of the Permafrost Carbon Network, and has provided leadership to NASA's Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability, or ABoVE, campaign. That's a great acronym. She's dedicated her career to field studies in boreal and Arctic ecosystems, and science communication to relay her passion for these ecosystems to the public. Her research specialties include wetlands, permafrost, and disturbances such as wildfires. Blah. Sorry, ugh. Thinking about wildfire season and I am getting a little nervous about it, because my family's all back in California. She is interested in the nexus of carbon cycling, energy, and food systems, and is primarily interested in building capacity on these themes for Northern communities who are on the front lines of climate change.
Our next panelist is Dr. Max Holmes. He's the deputy director of the Woodwell Climate Research Center. If you watched the Feedback Loops films, you've seen several scientists featured from Woodwell, formerly the Woods Hole Research Center. Though his research has taken him from the Siberian Arctic to the tropical Congo and a world of places in between, his work focuses on rivers and what water quality measurements can tell us about how climate change and other human disturbances impact water and chemical cycles in the environment. He's also interested in the vast quantities of ancient carbon held in Arctic permafrost, which may be released as permafrost thaws, exacerbating global warming. Dr. Holmes directs the Arctic Great Rivers Observatory and the Cape Cod Rivers Observatory, and co-directs the Global Rivers Observatory. He recently co-founded Science on the Fly, and initiative that unites the fly fishing and science communities to study and protect rivers around the world.
Next up, we have Dr. Edda Mutter. She's the science director of the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council in Anchorage, Alaska. In this role, she manages the Indigenous Observation Network, an environmental research program driven by First Nation and Alaska Native tribes in the Yukon River Basin. She's actually calling in today from Fort Yukon, which is a remote community on the Yukon River in the heart of the Yukon Flats, so big welcome. The community-based program has developed two projects that focus on water quality and activate layered dynamics to address concerns with regards to past and current changes to the landscape and hydrology, such as the linkage between terrestrial and aquatic systems. So, in partnership with First Nations and Alaska-Native tribes, she aims to assess and explore adaptation strategies to address the local environmental changes and to advance Indigenous water governance across the Yukon River basin.
And lastly, we're joined by Julie Mahler. She's born and raised in Fort Yukon and has resided in the Yukon Flat area her whole life. She's worked for the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge and the Council of Athabasca Government over the last 11 years, but has volunteered her expertise and knowledge to the community all her life. She's also working with local youth to teach traditional values and survival, as well as leading survival youth camps at her summer camp sites along the Porcupine and Yukon Rivers.
So, with that, I think we've introduced everyone here and I'm going to start us off with some questions. So, starting off, let's talk about permafrost. Here at the museum, we have a lot of cool stuff that's come out of permafrost, including mammoth hair and a jar of mammoth meat, which I'm sure would taste terrible because in the original excavator's account from 1901, they describe rounding bend in the river in Siberia and just being hit by the rotting smell. So, while we show all sorts of stuff that's come out of permafrost, it's actually kind of hard to include permafrost in a museum exhibit. So, I'd like to talk about what it actually is. Let's start with Dr. Turetsky. What is permafrost and why is it so important in this conversation about climate change and feedback loops?
Merritt Turetsky:
Well, that's a great story, Juliana. Once you've smelled ancient permafrost, there's no going back. You'll never forget it. Permafrost represents frozen ground. It is so much more than just frozen ground, which I'll speak to in just a moment, but there are many different kinds of permafrost. This frozen ground can be frozen rock, it can be frozen soil, frozen sediment, really, any earth material that remains frozen for several years in a row we consider to be permafrost. It's tricky, though, because it's buried by a layer of earth that freezes and thaws annually. Permafrost is underneath it, so permafrost is frozen ground that is subsurface, meaning you can be walking right on top of permafrost and not even really know it. Not all permafrost is the same.
There are many different kinds of permafrost. We think a lot about different characteristics, how much ice is contained or frozen water is in permafrost, how much carbon is contained in that permafrost, and this is all really pertinent to the role that permafrost plays in the climate system. So, for thousands and thousands of years, this frozen ground has been serving as a massive freezer for our climate system. It's been locking away biomass, life that persisted at the surface of the Arctic at one point became incorporated into this frozen ground and stored in these permafrost layers.
This is carbon the atmosphere has not seen, sometimes for many, many thousands, even millions of years, and so what we have is this stockpile of carbon stored in permafrost today. Again, it's been accumulating for a long time; today it represents more than twice the amount of carbon that's stored in the entire atmosphere. It contains more carbon than all of the world's vegetation, and it's all sitting in that frozen ground, of course, which is the backbone, the heart of the soil of the Arctic. And it's undergoing extreme warming, extreme wildfire today, so it's under a lot of threat.
Juliana Olsson:
So, I just wanted to ask any of the other panelists, if they want to chime in with their firsthand experiences about permafrost or what it means to you. And that's open for anyone to hop in.
Max Holmes:
Yeah, just briefly. I think that was a great introduction to what permafrost is, and Merritt described how one of the reasons it's important is just the vast amount of carbon that it contains, more than forests. In fact, another comparison I sometimes give is, we think of fossil fuels, coal, oil, and natural gas, as being really important for contributing to climate change, and there's an estimate that the magnitude of fossil fuels left in the ground that we could get to, should we continue down that road, is around 1,200 billion tons. Permafrost contains something like 1,500 billion tons of carbon. So, it's this massive stockpile of ancient carbon that's been locked away for thousands of years, but what we're worried about is what happens as the Earth warms, the Arctic warms, and that permafrost starts to thaw and release that ancient carbon.
Juliana Olsson:
And Julie? I mean, did you talk about it? Or we can hop onto the next question, too.
Edda Mutter:
Yes. Absolutely. Living up north, the permafrost is the stable ground, so with thawing the permafrost, not only it's like what Merritt and Max just explained, it's the carbon and the stockpile, but up here it's changing the life. Road systems degrade, you have infrastructure like water systems degrading. Because of permafrost thawing, you have homes, you have vegetation, landscape changes. So, it's that global impact, but also, it's the stability that we used to have, what we used to build on, is... We're losing that.
Juliana Olsson:
All right. Well, I'm going to hop onto our next question, and this is for you, Max. A lot of our past programs in the series have focused on the Arctic Ocean, but your work focuses on rivers. And when we spoke earlier before this program, you made a wonderful analogy between river system research and medicine, and this idea that a doctor will study your blood to get a better picture of your overall health. They're not really interested in your blood per se, and similarly, scientists study rivers to assess the health of the whole ecosystem. So, how is permafrost thaw impacting Arctic rivers, and what does this do to the ecosystem?
Max Holmes:
Right, so thanks for the question and the introduction to the question. Yeah, so I work on rivers, really, around the world and what we try to do is pick interesting rivers and sampling locations, and then collect water samples through the course of a year, and then over many years, and look at how the chemistry of that river changes over time. In part, that's motivated by trying to understand the river in and of itself, how it's changing, but it's also very much motivated by trying to understand changes in the watershed and the land area that drains into the river. So, in the context of permafrost, a lot of my work has been in the Arctic. We work on big rivers in the Russian Arctic, in Canada and Alaska and the Yukon River. I work with Edda and her colleagues on the Yukon River, and one of the things that we're measuring is the carbon in the river. It's different forms of carbon, as well as the age of the carbon.
So, you can radiocarbon date the carbon, figure out how old it was, and so one of the things that we've sort of predicted, and we've been doing this on some of the big Arctic rivers for about 20 years now, is that as warming continues and permafrost thaw accelerates, we'll start to see older and older carbon appearing in the rivers. What we've found so far, we've also sampled some smaller rivers that are draining actively-thawing permafrost regions and we found some really old carbon in some of those systems. I think prior to these measurements, the oldest carbon that had ever been measured in surface water, dissolved organic carbon that had been measured in surface water was some deep-ocean samples that were about 6,000 years old. We've measured dissolved organic carbon in some small Arctic rivers of over 20,000 years old.
So, this is carbon, again, that's been locked away in permafrost, in this permafrost freezer and is being released, mobilized as permafrost thaw. So, as a scientist, that's super exciting. Wow, this thing that we predicted is actually happening. As a system, as a parent, as everything else, that's not good news. We want the permafrost to remain frozen. We haven't yet seen big changes in the age of carbon near the mouths of the big Arctic rivers that we're sampling. The Yukon River, for example, the big Siberian rivers, we haven't seen big changes in the age of carbon, so that's good news but we're keeping at it, watching it. Again, as a scientist it's a really exciting thing to watch unfold, but yeah, what we really want to see is no change. We want that permafrost to remain frozen.
Juliana Olsson:
Yeah. Well, this is a perfect opportunity to pivot to Edda and Julie again, because you're actually out on the river right now in Fort Yukon. And because you're interacting with people whose daily lives are being impacted the most, you started talking a little bit about what these impacts are, like infrastructure falling apart. Could you talk a little bit more about that? And maybe, Julie, you can mention what changes you've seen over the course of your lifetime here on the river?
Julie Mahler:
Sure. Well, being on the river, a lot's changed. You don't see that permafrost on the bank side anymore, and the river is sloughing off because there's no permafrost holding it, so...
Edda Mutter:
Sorry.
Julie Mahler:
Somebody just walked in the door. But yeah, the river used to be narrower. All that bank side is sloughing away, the gravel bars are getting bigger, so it's wider, it's open, and you could tell... Not only that, the fire they let burn, all that fire that burns all that moss that's got to be the insulation to keep that permafrost. Now, you could go three foot down in the winter and still, no permafrost in some areas.
Edda Mutter:
I mean, we kind of really experience... Every, I would say, year is very unique, but it's the last years, the... And Max studies the river and we call it... The rivers are our blood circulatory system, and so the watershed, the Yukon is twice size of California. It's like if one system is blocked, it affects the whole entire blood system, and so we see in some areas where water levels are really, really low, whereas other areas you have floodings and it's high, and so that is something really unique. In the past years we experienced that.
Julie Mahler:
It depends on the rain, the weather, too. So, this year it's low. The water is really low on the Porcupine, from what I see. I've never seen it like that in a long time. So, usually you go the same route all the time. Now, you've got to find your way.
Edda Mutter:
Yeah, with a permafrost degradation, river navigation is becoming more and more challenging. With that, again, the impact to the community is about barge. How to get the fuel, how to get the food, that is all that not only permafrost, but it's also that social economic impact really closely tied with it.
Julie Mahler:
Do you think the Earth tilted? Is that why it's warming up and things are thawing out?
Merritt Turetsky:
There are such valuable stories coming directly from the North, and I think what we're trying to convey as a group is that permafrost affects every aspect of livelihood. Living, the ecology, the animals, the plants, and how humans depend on land and water, all of it is impacted as the permafrost change, and that's why we describe permafrost as the backbone. It literally is the glue that holds Arctic land together sometimes, and so those are all important local and regional impacts. It's through these climate feedbacks, the carbon emissions back to the atmosphere, that permafrost is going to impact every single person on this planet.
So, permafrost has this incredible ability to affect people locally, regionally, and globally, because of all of the things that permafrost has done for us on this planet. I think the big surprises for us, we've known permafrost has been thawing for many decades. That's no surprise. It's going to continue to thaw in concert with rising temperatures, but the wildfires we're seeing right now in places like Alaska and Siberia, that hot and dry conditions, that's thawing permafrost. But last year in Alaska, my field sites were cold and wet, and that wetness, the extreme rainfall that my sites experienced in the summertime also led to very rapid permafrost thaw. So, all types of extreme weather are triggering additional thaw above and beyond what we were anticipating. So, it gives you a sense of where some of the surprises have laid for us.
Juliana Olsson:
Yeah, those are great points about, it's not just hot and dry heat. There's other things going on, too. So, this is a question for Edda and Merritt and Julie. So, we had a conversation before this session where you brought up a very important point about scientists and local Indigenous communities needing to build a common language so that people's observations and insights, like firsthand accounts, aren't left out of the big picture and they aren't excluded from the science. I know as an exhibit writer, I'm constantly aware of how terms mean one thing in science and they mean something else entirely different in everyday speech, including this idea of positive feedback. In everyday speech that's a good thing, and when it comes to permafrost thaw, a positive feedback loop is not going to be good for us. So, I'd love it if you could give some examples of how you've addressed communication barriers in your work. Anyone can start, but I just would love to hear from the three of you.
Merritt Turetsky:
Edda and Julie, do you want to take a crack at that first?
Edda Mutter:
Yep. Yeah, sure. So, Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council is a grassroot organizations over the 23 years and really working with Indigenous communities. So, one part we always have is a talking circle, and so when you start to have a conversation or you start to discuss, it's more like you talk and you listen. A feather is getting passed along to the next speaker, and I think providing... And it's not, I would say, having a common language form, but I think it's learning, it's listening. And with learning and listening, within the Indigenous language, there's a lot of vocabulary which is very common for scientists. It is not really... There's no translation for it, and so sometimes they speak the same language, but like I said, it's also that listening and learning both sides. Merritt, I think what I'm talking.
Merritt Turetsky:
I love that, and I love the listening circle and we need to listen to all types of knowledge. I think the scientific community has recognized that communities can be permafrost knowledge holders without actually using the word permafrost because as that permafrost layer changes, it causes all sorts of changes to the land and to the water, and those ultimately are the impacts that everyone is interested in understanding. And so, I think sharing and listening to common values and identifying what those land and waterscape changes are that we're all interested in, we can often be indirectly discussing permafrost change. Again, it's this subsurface thing. It's often hidden from view when you're walking over it, and yet when you walk across a thawing landscape, there's complete agreement. No matter what your background is, you inherently understand what's going on. The land is sloughing off into the rivers, or wetlands are taking over forests.
There's really only one thing that can be causing that kind of profound landscape change, and so we know it in our hearts, and we know it because we're sharing core values of the impacts that are affecting communities today. So, I think the emphasis is on listening, sharing stories about those core values and the core changes to both land and water that we're all very interested in, and again, I think a big shift has been scientists listening to understand how the questions we ask can build capacity and can actually benefit Northern communities. And so, I think it's through that kind of circle, that listening circle, and coming together over things that are of mutual interest. And we learn so much from Northern communities. They have taught us a tremendous amount, observations that we never would've been able to make on our own, and so we are very thankful when different types of knowledge systems come together.
Juliana Olsson:
Awesome, and-
Edda Mutter:
And maybe-
Juliana Olsson:
Yeah, Julie, if you have anything else to add, I'd love to hear it.
Edda Mutter:
I think she has this great insight because she is really that incredible knowledge holder, but also works across. She works with me, she teaches me, and shows me where to install certain sensors safely, but she is also working with Fish and wildlife. And so, she really has that experience how to communicate across different, I would say onion layers.
Julie Mahler:
Well, that's basically what I do for the communities, too. Help them out, get them going, make sure they know where they're at. That's why I'm having a camp on the first week of August, and I invited her to come and teach some kids what she does, so that'll be great.
Edda Mutter:
So, it's building these bridges-
Julie Mahler:
So I can pass it on. Maybe somebody would be interested in that line of work. That's what I do with the kids. Hopefully they pick up after us.
Juliana Olsson:
Yeah. That's a great point. Is there anything, especially working with kids, particular lessons that you're trying to teach about permafrost in the landscape? Or anything that the kids are noticing and bringing up with you?
Julie Mahler:
Well, they ask me questions, "What was it like before?" So, I tell them. They don't know because they've never seen it, so that's what we do. We tell the kids what it was before, and now it's not like that anymore. And they learn a lot about water, the water quality, because Robert does the water sampling and all that, so he takes some kids with him to learn all that.
Edda Mutter:
Yeah, bringing together is what Mary and Max are doing, but what we, as in the middle, is trying to bring the youth because they're the upcoming leaders, and so giving them the tools and the knowledge, what we learn, in their hands because they have to make these really tough decisions when it comes to the communities.
Juliana Olsson:
Well, I'm going to actually start taking some audience questions, working them in right now. So, one of the first ones we got, this one is for Max. "When you talk about the..." And it's from Lionel Fray. "When you talk about the amount of carbon stored in permafrost, is this the amount that's released when it thaws, presumably as carbon dioxide and methane, or does it all go into the atmosphere, or does a large portion remain in the ground?"
Max Holmes:
Yeah, that's a great question, and I think I gave the number of 1,500 billion tons of carbon locked up in permafrost. That's an estimate of the total amount of carbon that's frozen away in permafrost. It's not all, by any means, going to be released to the atmosphere when it thaws. Even that permafrost that thaws, all of its carbon's not immediately released. So, it's a fairly slow process, but we worry about it because it's this massive pool. One of the best estimates of the amount of carbon that could be released from thawing permafrost this century if we continue on a business-as-usual trajectory, and by that, I mean we continue to use fossil fuels. It's sort of a way we're doing it now, we continue to deforest, putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like we're doing now, that estimate is that in this century we could release about 10% of the carbon locked in permafrost.
So, that's 150 billion tons. To put that number into some context, so over a century that would average 1.5 billion tons per year. All the activities in the U.S. release about... The human activities release about 1.4 billion tons per year, for some context there. So, in and of itself, it's not going to spell catastrophe, but it's a lot of carbon and it's going to make it a lot harder for us to get things under control.
Juliana Olsson:
On a related note, this is a question from Camilla. "Is there an estimate of much the total permafrost has already thawed?"
Max Holmes:
Yeah. I'll offer one perspective and maybe others can jump in. I sort of think of... Well, if you look over a longer timeframe, over the past many thousands of years, permafrost has been accumulating carbon. Carbon's been stored away in permafrost, and I think of it sort of like a teeter totter. Now, I'd say it's roughly in balance. I'd probably get a little bit of argument from some people. Maybe it's losing a little bit, maybe it's accumulating a little bit, but it's hard to say. It's roughly in balance, but what we're worried about and where we think we're headed is it tipping the other direction so that there's a net release of carbon from permafrost.
Merritt Turetsky:
Those are all wonderful. I wanted to just build on one of the analogies Max gave, because I think this is really important. 20 years ago, we had back-of-the-envelope estimates about how permafrost would govern our future climate, and the numbers were really scary. We didn't know if it would be 10% of the total permafrost carbon pool or 100% of the permafrost carbon pool, and so all of that science has happened in just the last 10 to 15 years, and it really is... It's a good news, but still a scary news scenario. We have been able to downgrade the estimate of how much carbon we think will be released from thawing permafrost. It's still a big number. I agree with the numbers that Max gave to you. Those are still large numbers, but they are actually downgraded from what we were expecting just even 15 years ago.
The way I like to describe this is human emissions. So, if we continue to emit fossil fuels, they will continue to, by far, dominate emissions. Permafrost thaw will not come close to human emissions, but it's like we're taking that emissions dial and we're really ramping it up even more. It is like adding another industrial major player to the global emission scene. The good news is that the best science we have tells us the more we buy in to climate mitigation policy, the more seriously we decarbonize our economy, and the faster we do that, the more frozen ground we will save in the Arctic.
We have a better chance of keeping more permafrost frozen into the future, and thus, we will then keep more carbon in the ground. We need to keep the carbon in the ground. That's where it's safest from a climate perspective. That's where it's safest from the perspective of Northerners trying to use the land. I would like my children and grandchildren to be able to visit an Arctic that has some aspects of frozen ground to it. The only way we're going to do that is if we decarbonize. That is, full stop, the answer to our climate story.
Juliana Olsson:
Great. Thank you. We've got another question in from Jan Steager and this is for Edda, Julie, and Max. She was asking if you can talk about the impact of thawing permafrost on rivers, such as widening temperature increases, wildlife changes, impacts on local fisheries. So, I don't know if we want to start with Max talking about the river systems themselves, and then to Julie and Edda about the cultural impacts?
Max Holmes:
I was actually going to defer to Julie on that one because I think she already provided some insight there, and I'd love to hear more.
Julie Mahler:
Well, on the river, the fish are changing now. They're looking for colder water to go in, so fish are going different streams. You could tell the water's warmed up, especially on the Yukon it has, but that's the mighty Yukon. That's life there on the river. Yeah. They say water is life. I notice a lot of growth, different kind of growth. Since it's warm, there's different plants grow where it never grew before, so I see a lot of different change.
Juliana Olsson:
And how is that impacting the people living on the river? So, I'm assuming if the fish are changing, what does that mean for people who need to fish?
Julie Mahler:
Yeah. They got to look for a different source of fish now to keep...
Edda Mutter:
Yeah, it's the second year in a row, they closed King Salmon fishing on the Yukon. So, there is that really traditional salmon people that's attached to it, and so one aspect is really adapting to different fish species they're using as a food source. But another is, really, what impacts them is their drinking water and drinking water systems with more of that permafrost thawing and erosion we see, and the whitening. We have more sedimentation in there, and so that filter system is getting clogged with what Max was referring to, was that carbon, that more dissolved carbon we see in the systems, and that is not getting filtered out and using chlorination for their disinfection. So, there's that kind of health impact with some of these chlorinated metabolites, they're seen to be cancerous. And so, there's this kind of environmental to food resource to water security is a problem. Yeah.
Juliana Olsson:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, on a related note to that, this is a question for Max from Ralph about... Max, you'd mentioned that you found organic carbon dated to around 20,000 years old in some of the smaller Arctic rivers, but there's been no change at the mouths of these rivers. Is that because the carbon being is being reburied in the sediments? So, we're just talking about sediments right now, or is it the result of dilution?
Max Holmes:
Yeah. So, I'm talking about dissolved organic carbon, not particulate, so it's not stuff that's buried in the sediments. It's either dilution, that's certainly part of it, and that's probably the main part of the answer, but the other interesting part of the story that we found is that this carbon that has been locked away for many thousands of years is actually really tasty to the bacteria. It's a good energy source, so it's consumed rapidly. Oftentimes in different environments, if you find, say, old carbon and soils, it's what we call recalcitrant. It's the stuff that's left over after all the good stuff has been consumed, but this permafrost carbon, again, has been frozen away for so long, we're finding that it's a really good food source, so a lot of it's consumed pretty quickly.
So yeah, I debate with some of my colleagues about the reason why... Well, exactly the answer to the question that you just asked, "Why don't we see the old stuff near the mouths of the big rivers?" Some of my colleagues will argue it's because it's being released, but it's being consumed before it gets to the mouths, others say it's dilution. It's probably some combination of those two answers. But yeah, that's a great question. Thank you.
Juliana Olsson:
Okay. So, this next one is for Merritt. It's, "What level of global warming above the pre-industrial temperature will trigger methane feedback loop due to the release of methane from melting permafrost?" So, we've been talking about carbon, I guess... Well, mostly CO2, but I know methane's a whole other beast. So, this person said that they read five degrees Celsius and was wondering if that was a reasonable estimate.
Merritt Turetsky:
Yeah, thank you for that question. So, we talk about permafrost carbon. It's this big pool. It's made up of yummy carbon and yucky carbon, the way that Max just described it, but it's also interesting from a scientific perspective because it leads to two different greenhouse gases. I'm just talking about carbon turnover or processing. So, under dryer conditions, we see fairly rapid turnover of permafrost carbon in organic matter into CO2, but as those soils or sediments become increasingly wet, the amount of permafrost carbon that could actually yield methane starts to increase. And so, right now, as permafrost thaws, we have some of that carbon being processed into CO2 and some being processed into methane. Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas. It is able to trap heat in the atmosphere much more strongly than CO2, so we're very interested in this balance between this two-gas problem.
Right now, I feel that the media has really latched on to the methane bomb. You hear the methane craters releasing abrupt methane into the atmosphere, so absolutely methane emissions today are an issue, but up 'til now and likely into our near future, the main concern from a climate perspective is how much permafrost carbon is going to be released as CO2. I don't anticipate that changing, actually. Most of the models do show increasing amounts of methane beyond 2100. As more and more thaw occurs on the landscape we do expect to see increasing amounts of methane, but I don't believe there is this vicious, independent methane loop that is going to be triggered, or a vicious cycle that will be triggered.
So, I do understand there's a little bit of debate on this. I continue to advocate that I think we need to keep our eyes on both gases, we need to continue to think about the ratio between the two, but certainly there are some aspects of methane release that are not as well understood as we would like them to be. For example, methane production in subsea permafrost, as that starts to thaw. We are getting a better handle on what those estimates are likely to be into the future. Again, our emphasis absolutely needs to be on decarbonization, preserving carbon in the ground, and keeping our focus not just on methane into the future, but on both of these really critical greenhouse gases.
Juliana Olsson:
That's great.
Max Holmes:
Maybe I'll just add a couple of comments there, if I can, and I certainly agree with all of that. I think oftentimes, people picture, when we're talking about methane and carbon dioxide in the Arctic, that these things are frozen away in permafrost and when that permafrost thaws, it's released. And for the most part, that's not true. What's frozen away in the permafrost is the remains of plants and animals that lived a long time ago, and then when that material thaws, it decomposes, it rots due to action of bacteria. And that process as a byproduct produces carbon dioxide or methane, depending on how much oxygen is in the environment. So yeah, it's not that you get this immediate release when permafrost thaws. I mean, one exception there, Merritt mentioned subsea permafrost and there, you get something called methane clathrates, where functionally it is just methane frozen away.
So, there are some people that worry that with warming, you could get this massive abrupt release of methane with thawing clathrates. I think that's not something that keeps me up at night, let's say. It's a very low-probability, not very well-understood process, but I think most would agree it's low probability, whereas the other things that we've been talking about, permafrost thaw, the decomposition of its carbon in terrestrial permafrost, that's the really high probability thing that I think we should be worrying about, thinking about, using it to motivate us to do what we can to put the brakes on climate change now.
Juliana Olsson:
Yeah. Well, on that note, this is a combination of a couple different questions, but would it be useful for communities located near permafrost areas to present a resolution before something like the United Nations, similar to the island nations suit being about losing their homelands due to climate change? Is that one way to really fight this? And on a related note, how many people are going to be affected directly by this permafrost melting and destabilizing at the ground? I know there's almost two pictures going on. There's the local impacts, but then there's also this feedback cycle that's the global impact.
Merritt Turetsky:
Maybe I can tackle the second part of that question and then turn the baton over to the first part. So, some recent estimates showed that permafrost thaw directly will be impacting somewhere between six and 10 million people living across the Arctic globally. These peoples are relying on about 12 to 1,500 communities, and of that total estimate, nearly half of those people will be probably losing permafrost completely in their local area within the next 50 years. So, this is not a distant effect. This is happening today, it's affecting people today. It has the potential to affect a lot of people living across the Arctic and across the taiga region, and it's a complete loss. It's irreversible change of the landscape, whereas in the past permafrost could thaw and then reform, once permafrost thaws under this shift in climate, it's never coming back. So, that is a very, very profound loss for people living in that region.
Juliana Olsson:
I guess related, would this be something that, for example, the Council of the Athabascan Government or other communities banding together to bring a resolution before some larger...? The U.N. was mentioned, but I don't know if other large-scale organizations... Where do we take this? Where do the people who get most affected, where can they bring up this issue to get everyone to chip into the solution? Because it's something that's... It's a problem that is caused everywhere, but it's felt particularly in one place.
Max Holmes:
I can offer a couple of perspectives there, then open it up for others. But certainly, the U.N. climate negotiations, the Conference of the Parties, I think the question mentioned the small island nations, and they're being dramatically impacted by climate change due to sea level rise. In fact, some of those... I was on a panel a few years ago with President Anote Tong, who was the past president of Kiribati, and that country essentially may not exist in 100 years. I mean, he has an incredibly powerful message. I was just kind of stunned and very much moved by listening to what he had to say, and I think those messages need to be heard by the climate negotiators, I think they need to be heard by everybody.
And Arctic residents, Julie and others, are doing lots to get their stories heard, and I can only hope that more people hear those stories and listen to those stories, and recognize that we need to get to work. We need to decarbonize, as Merritt has said, for the most vulnerable people around the world for our own futures. But yeah, I think one is at the international level, and certainly the Arctic Nations and different Arctic groups are represented in those discussions. I think their voices should be amplified more, but just doing things like we're doing right now and getting those stories out to people around the country, around the world, and hopefully motivating action.
Juliana Olsson:
Well, thank you for that, and as a quick change of pace, we've actually been getting a few questions coming in about what permafrost actually looks like, so going back to basics. Specifically, they want to know if it looks like ice. So, if anyone can help clarify it or describe the texture, the smell, what it feels like, what it looks like.
Max Holmes:
It looks like all different things because it's frozen ground. I mean, it can be a rock, and a frozen rock doesn't really look any different than a thawed rock, but I think when we talk about it, and particularly when we talk about it in the carbon context, it's soil. Some permafrost has a very high ice content; more than 50% of the volume can be ice, so sometimes it just looks like muddy ice. And when that thaws, it just runs off and the landscape collapses. Other times it's just kind of frozen soil, but yeah, I think as has been mentioned a couple of times, it has kind of a distinct smell, a really strong, pungent smell that sort of sticks with you. But yeah, it's hard to say, "Permafrost looks like this." It's all different kinds of things.
Merritt Turetsky:
But if maybe I could add onto that and tell a story. Julie was talking about diversity of perspectives and bringing scientists to the kids and having kids teach the scientists. I'm fortunate I work in muskeg, or really peat-rich areas and bogs and fens, and many of these in the North are frozen because they have this beautiful insulating layer at the surface that really keeps the ground cold. And my favorite, favorite thing to do is to bring kids or journalists, sometimes politicians or very-esteemed scientists, drag them out into the field with me and I just dig down to the permafrost layer, and I ask them to stick their arm down in this mucky soil and knock on the permafrost.
And the first time they take their hand and they're sticking their hand in gooey peat, and then they knock on that really hard frozen layer, maybe 20, 30 centimeters down from their feet, their eyes... That's permafrost. They might not see it, again, because it's underground, it's under surface, but they feel it and it's solid and everything in their feet is sinking and sloppy and messy, but they're knocking on a frozen layer. And it doesn't matter how old you are, it doesn't matter what your background is, that brings glee, that brings joy and it's really a profound moment.
Juliana Olsson:
Well, thank you for that. Now I want to do that. So, let's shift a little bit here. Let's try to end on maybe a more hopeful or positive note. This was a question from Chang May. "Do you have any suggestions or recommendations for what people like them at the grassroots level can do to help hold permafrost from further deterioration?" And I guess this kind of depends on where you are in the world, because your actions might change based on where you are and what you can do. But I would love for all the panelists to chime in at this point of solutions, and what can we do to keep the permafrost frozen?
Julie Mahler:
Yeah, that's my question.
Max Holmes:
I'll offer one perspective. Talk to people about climate change. Try to talk to people that may not have the same views that you do. Don't argue with them, share your experience, your knowledge, listen to them and try to make some progress there. Vote. I'm not suggesting who you vote for, I'd say whatever flavor of candidate that you liked, talk to them about climate change and suggest that they should do something about it.
Edda Mutter:
That's kind of being up in the Arctic, so energy and energy source is one of the big topic when... You cannot just divide that with climate change because we are very carbon-oil dependent, and so I think that there really has to be a switch when it comes to our energy source. I think effort has to be put into exploring new ways, how up in the Arctic they can keep their homes warm and can move, the transportation aspect. I think certain investment has to put in place to be able to tackle climate change and to maintain the permafrost. What do you think, Julie?
Julie Mahler:
So, what do we do? How do we keep permafrost?
Merritt Turetsky:
Yeah. I mean, permafrost is thawing on the front lines of climate change. Where climate change is occurring most rapidly globally is in the Arctic, and we're watching this now unfold. Of course, scientists and Northerners have been watching permafrost thaw for many years, but right now, as we're tracking wildfires in Russia and that is hitting the news, we're all, around the world, watching permafrost burn. Some of the big fires in Siberia last summer and again this summer is burning in the world's most sensitive carbon-rich permafrost. This is not good news for all of us around the world because it will impact our climate. I think it can feel so daunting. This question that Julie just posed, "what do we do? How can we keep...? What should we be doing?" I think the answer is do something. Start little.
Like Max said, the number one effective community-building thing that we can all do is talk to your family, talk to your neighbors, talk to anyone who will listen to you about your core beliefs and your knowledge and share that. There's lots of other things you can start doing as well, but start with something that seems reasonable and then keep going, just do something to be leaders, to demonstrate that you care about this issue. There's all sorts of things you can get involved in. You can use your pocket book, you can use your vote, you can use your voice. You can lead by example and maybe decarbonize your lifestyle, and hope that you are leading by example and others will follow. It doesn't matter what you do, as long as we do something. And if everybody around the world does something, then we will start to make a stronger ripple, and we will decarbonize the economy, and we will save some permafrost. But business as usual, as Max mentioned earlier, we will lose the world's permafrost, and it will be gone forever and it will not come back.
Juliana Olsson:
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for all of that. Just real quick before I get to any closing remarks, we're talking about in some sense, there's the solution part and the other sense, there's a need for adaptation and mitigation, just because it's going to take a while. Even if we decarbonize our economies and societies, it's going to take a while. So, just understanding a little bit more about how people like Northern communities are adapting right now to their loss of permafrost. So, again, if anyone wants to chime in and talk about that feel [inaudible 00:54:48].
Edda Mutter:
Julie?
Julie Mahler:
I'd like to ask a question about the mammoth. They were here before, because we found their tusks, their teeth, their bones. What caused them to disappear? Would it be that it already... The weather changed? Is that what...? It got too warm? That was how many years ago? Way before my time, so it probably started there.
Merritt Turetsky:
And that's a beautiful example of how Northerners have been adapting to a changing climate. There have been profound changes in what we now call the Arctic, including changes in mammals, food sources, vegetation, and in permafrost distributions. So, I have so much faith and passion and love for the resilience of Northern communities, and when I say that, I mean everything from vegetation communities to human communities. They are some of the toughest, strongest, most resilient communities around and they will adapt to change, but it's so rapid today relative to anything we've seen historically. So, we're asking settlements and built infrastructure to adapt and to change to some of the most pressing and rapid environmental changes on record, and that's pushing the limits. That's where the world needs to step in and understand what we're actually asking these communities to do.
Juliana Olsson:
Yeah, well said. Well, it's 5:57, so I'm just going to wrap up this evening's program. Please, thank me, everyone in joining tonight's speaker in... Well, please join me in thanking tonight's speakers and their really interesting research and perspectives. We'd also like to give special thanks to those who made this program possible. So, that's our behind-the-scenes team who helped sort through all of your questions. I'm sorry we couldn't get to all of them in this time. That's also our donors, volunteers, viewers like you. And finally, to all of our partners who help us reach, educate, and empower millions of people around the world today and every day, thank you so much.
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