Russian scientists say climate change to blame for mysterious Siberia craters

Guardian (UK) via AFP: Russian scientists have now discovered seven giant craters in remote Siberia, a geologist told AFP on Thursday, adding that the mysterious phenomenon was believed to be linked to climate change.

The discovery of an enormous chasm in a far northern region known to locals as “the end of the world” in July last year prompted speculation it had been caused by a meteorite or even aliens.

 “We have just learnt that in Yakutia, new information has emerged about a giant crater 1km [0.6 miles] in diameter,” the deputy director of the Oil and Gas Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vasily Bogoyavlensky, told AFP.

He said this brought to seven the number of reported pits. “Footage allows us to identify minimum seven craters, but in fact there are plenty more,” he said.

All of the craters have been discovered in the remote, energy-rich Yamalo-Nenetsky region in north-western Siberia. Scientists say that rather than aliens or meteorites, the holes are caused by the melting of underground ice in the permafrost, which has possibly been sped up by rising temperatures due to global warming....

A coat of arms from the Krasnoyarsk District

Are Siberia’s methane blow-holes the first warning sign of unstoppable climate change?

News.com.au: What do three enormous craters in the Siberian wastelands have to do with a terrified American climate scientist? Methane. And that’s something to scare us all. The end of the world could be starting right now — in a frozen Siberian wasteland known as Yamal. It translates as “The End of the Land”.

The first mysterious crater was spotted by oil workers earlier this month. It was an 80m wide cavern that reached deep into the earth. Since then, the Siberian Times reports goatherds have found a further two enormous vents in the ground.

Russian researchers have returned from their investigation of the first find and taken water and soil samples to help resolve how the hole was formed. ...[S]cientists already have a pretty good idea. Explosive vents of vast quantities of methane gas.

Now a new, ominous, name could be attached to them: Dragon’s mouths. Here’s where a blog posted by American professor in glaciology Dr Jason Box at the weekend comes in: “The dragon breath hypothesis has me losing sleep.” Dr Box highlights signs of alarmingly huge spikes of methane being released into the atmosphere above Siberia.

It’s what that means which has him alarmed. He’s not mincing his words. He’s issued a no-holds barred call to action. “This is an all hands on deck moment,” he writes. “We’re in the age of consequences.”...

Going ashore on the Yamal Peninsula, photo by Fridtjof Nansen

Hundreds evacuated as heavy floods sweep across Siberia

RT: Hundreds of people have been evacuated and tens of thousands left without power after heavy floods struck southern Siberia. A state of emergency has been introduced in three regions. Those areas are the Altai region, Khakassia Republic, and Altai Republic, said Russian Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov, who added that a “high alert” has been issued for two other regions - Tuva Republic and Buryatia Republic.

Meanwhile, Puchkov also noted that other regions are at risk from the flooding - such as Sakha (Yakutia) Republic and the Amur region – due to the fact that rivers in southern Siberia have responded quickly to the heavy rains.

In the Altai Republic alone, the flooding has already destroyed 230 kilometers of roads and 1.5 kilometers of a federal highway which links Russia with Mongolia. Fifteen bridges were washed away. Heavy floods swallowed up nearly 1,000 houses in Altai Republic, where up to 3,500 people - including 927 children - live. Hundreds are now homeless and have been forced to seek shelter in temporary accommodation centers. Emergency services have confirmed that one person has died and three are missing. Several areas in the republic have been left without electricity after heavy rain brought down 48 utility poles.

On Saturday, the ministry launched a massive rescue operation in the affected regions, evacuating hundreds of people. However, many domestic animals didn’t survive, according to local officials. A local emergencies ministry estimates that nearly 4,000 houses have been damaged or destroyed by water in the affected regions. Roughly 8,000 people have been forced to evacuate....

A map of central Siberia, public domain

Thawing permafrost: The speed of coastal erosion in Eastern Siberia has nearly doubled

Alfred Wegener Institute: The high cliffs of Eastern Siberia – which mainly consist of permafrost – continue to erode at an ever quickening pace. This is the conclusion which scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research have reached after their evaluation of data and aerial photographs of the coastal regions for the last 40 years. According to the researchers, the reasons for this increasing erosion are rising summer temperatures in the Russian permafrost regions as well the retreat of the Arctic sea ice. This coastal protection recedes more and more on an annual basis. As a result, waves undermine the shores. At the same time, the land surface begins to sink. The small island of Muostakh east of the Lena Delta is especially affected by these changes. Experts fear that it might even disappear altogether should the loss of land continue.

The interconnectedness is clear and unambiguous: The warmer the east Siberian permafrost regions become, the quicker the coast erodes. “If the average temperature rises by 1 degree Celsius in the summer, erosion accelerates by 1.2 metres annually,“ says AWI geographer Frank Günther, who investigates the causes of the coastal breakdown in Eastern Siberia together with German and Russian colleagues, and who has published his findings in two scientific articles.

...This increase in temperature is not without consequences. Whereas a thick layer of sea ice used to protect the frozen soil almost all year round, it now recedes in this part of the Arctic for increasing periods of time during the summer months. The number of summer days on which the sea ice in the southern Laptew Sea vanishes completely grows steadily. “During the past two decades, there were, on average, fewer than 80 ice-free days in this region per year. During the past three years, however, we counted 96 ice-free days on average. Thus, the waves can nibble at the permafrost coasts for approximately two more weeks each year,“ explains AWI permafrost researcher Paul Overduin.

The waves dig deep recesses into the base of the high coasts. The result: The undermined slopes break off bit by bit. During the past 40 years, the coastal areas surveyed retreated on average 2.2 meters per year. “During the past four years, this value has increased at least 1.6 times, in certain instances up to 2.4 times to reach 5.3 meters per year,“ says Paul Overduin.

For the little island of Muostakh east of the harbour town of Tiksi, this may well mean extinction. “In fewer than one hundred years, the island will break up into several sections, and then it will disappear quickly,“ predicts Frank Günther....

Waiting for supplies in Eastern Siberia, shot by NASA ICE, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Siberian heat wave leads to wildfires

The Kitsap Sun: An intense heat wave in Siberia has contributed to an unusual flare up of wildfires across the fragile and carbon-rich landscape. Smoke from the fires is lofting high into the atmosphere, and is drifting toward the Arctic, where soot can hasten the melting of snow and sea ice.

The Siberian city of Norilsk, the most northerly city in the world with a population greater than 100,000, recorded temperatures above 83F over eight consecutive days starting on July 18, according to blogger Chris Burt of Weather Underground. During that timespan, Burt reported, the mercury hit 90F, breaking the record for the hottest temperature recorded for the city. For comparison the average July high temperature in Norilsk is a comparatively chilly 61F.

Norilsk isn’t an isolated example, but rather sits amid a sea of abnormally hot temperatures and smoky conditions in north-central Siberia. According to NASA’s Earth Observatory, from July 20 through July 27, temperatures were about 30F above average across a large swath of this vast, sparsely populated region.

The warm weather has contributed to a spike in wildfires. As of July 29, wildfires continued to burn at least 22,200 acres in Siberia, according to news reports. Heavy smoke from them grounded commercial flights in Omsk, a city in southwestern Siberia, Russia Today reported.

The Siberian fires come on the heels of Russia’s worst wildfire season on record in 2012. Fires burned roughly 74 million acres that year, well above the 50 million acres burned on average for the period from 2000 to 2008. While it’s still early to tell if 2013 will challenge 2012 for a record-setting year, one thing to note about this season is the unusual location of the fires. Typically, large wildfires burn on the southern fringe of the taiga, a dense forest ecosystem also known as the boreal forest, but this year’s fires are burning in a more central portion of the taiga....

A view of Norilsk, shot by Qweasdqwe, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Siberian caves warn of permafrost meltdown

AlphaGalileo via the Geological Society of London: Climate records captured in Siberian caves suggest 1.5 degrees of warming is enough to trigger thawing of permafrost, according to a paper to be given at the Geological Society of London on 27 June. Permafrost regions cover 24% of the northern hemisphere land surface, and hold an estimated 17,000 Gt of organic carbon. Thawing releases CO2 and CH4, creating positive feedback during greenhouse warming.

The researchers, led by Gideon Henderson at the University of Oxford’s Department of Earth Sciences, studied speleothem records from the caves to identify periods where temperatures were above freezing. Speleothems, such as stalactites and stalagmites, form when water seeps through cracks in cave walls, dissolving minerals which precipitate in the air filled cave.

‘Cave temperatures usually approximate the local mean annual air temperature’ says Anton Vaks, the paper’s lead author. ‘When they drop below 0 degrees, the rock above and around the cave freezes, and speleothem growth stops.’

By dating the speleothems and comparing their ages to existing climate records, it is possible to identify the degree of warming which caused the permafrost to melt. New results from Ledyanaya Lenskaya Cave, Eastern Siberia, extend previous records to one million years, and show major deposition of speleothems at around one million years and 400,000 years ago.

‘Both episodes occurred when global temperatures increased 1.5°C ± 0.5 above the pre-industrial level’ says Vaks, ‘showing that this degree of warming is a tipping point for continuous permafrost to start thawing.’ Global temperatures are currently around 0.7 degrees above pre-industrial level, with current models suggesting that a warming of 1.5°C ± 0.5 will be achieved within 10-30 years....

Siberia's Laptev Sea viewed from a NASA satellite

Siberia could experience widespread permafrost thaw due to global warming

Lee Rannals in RedOrbit: More evidence is pointing to the nightmare scenario that global warming is taking a toll on our planet. Oxford University scientists say that a global temperature rise of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit could thaw the ground over a large area of Siberia, threatening the release of carbon from soil.

If the thawing of Siberia’s permafrost occurs, it could see that over 1,000 gigatons of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane are dished out into the atmosphere, adding an even larger global warming threat.

The scientists studied stalactites and stalagmites from caves located along the permafrost frontier in Siberia, where the ground stays permanently frozen in a layer of tens to hundreds of feet thick. Because these cave features only grow when liquid rainwater and snow melt drips into the caves, these formations record 500,00 years of changing permafrost conditions.

Records from 400,000 years ago show that a global warming of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit is enough to cause substantial thawing of permafrost far north from its present-day southern limit.

“The stalactites and stalagmites from these caves are a way of looking back in time to see how warm periods similar to our modern climate affect how far permafrost extends across Siberia,” lead author Dr Anton Vaks of Oxford University’s Department of Earth Sciences, said in a statement. “As permafrost covers 24 percent of the land surface of the Northern hemisphere significant thawing could affect vast areas and release gigatonnes of carbon.”...

Permafrost in South Gydan, Siberia, shot by Skonstantinov09, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Record temperatures and wildfires in eastern Russia

NASA: Forests and bog land in far eastern Russia have been burning since the beginning of June 2012. Contributing to the record fires have been the record temperatures of this past summer. This summer in Siberia has been one of hottest on record. The average temperature ranged around 93 degrees Fahrenheit and there doesn't seem to be any break in the weather coming anytime soon.

The fires in eastern Russia have affected the districts of Krasnoyarsk, Tuva, Irkutsk, Kurgan, and the Republic of Khakassia. Especially hard hit is the city of Tomsk. According to official figures, over 24,000 acres of land had been burnt in Tomsk by early August. The city has been covered by heavy smog for weeks and the airport has been out of operation since the beginning of July.

On August 23rd, the Russian Information and News Agency (RIA Novosti) reported that "firefighters extinguished all six forest fires over the past 24 hours that remained raging in Russia’s Siberia this summer, the regional forestry department said in a statement on Thursday. There are no more registered fires in the region, but the emergencies situation still remain in force in three areas of the Tomsk region due to the high risk of new wildfires outbreak," the statement added. However, it also reported that "more than 200,000 hectares [494.210 acres] of forest already burned down in Siberia and the Russian Far East, where fires are still raging, since the start of the summer." On August 28, RIA Novosti reported that: "The majority of wildfires triggered by the summer heat wave in Russia have been put out, but 11 wildfires with a total area of 838 hectares [over 2000 acres] are still raging in Khabarovsk Territory." These are the fires that still burn in the image taken today by the MODIS instrument on the Aqua satellite.

Of course wildfires are devastating to any area, but ecologically this is catastrophic for this region with many rare animals living in Siberia's unique ecosystem.

So to the fires burning in Russia will have worldwide effects as the torched peat bogs whose layers consist of dead plant materials will end up releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide into the air accelerating the greenhouse effect and making the air nearly unbreathable. Record numbers of fires in the summer of 2010 drew attention to this damaging situation...

August 28 satellite image from NASA

Satellite sees smoke from Siberian fires reach the US coast

Science Daily: Fires burning in Siberia recently sent smoke across the Pacific Ocean and into the U.S. and Canada. Images of data taken by the nation's newest Earth-observing satellite tracked aerosols from the fires taking six days to reach America's shores.

Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite's Ozone Mapping Profiler Suite (OMPS) tracks aerosols, like this smoke, that are transported by winds across the globe.

The Voice of Russia reported that 11,000 hectares (about 42.4 square miles) of forests in Siberia were on fire in May and that the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations says roughly 80 percent of these fires are intentionally set to clear land for farming.

Colin Seftor, an atmospheric physicist working for Science Systems and Applications, Inc. at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md. studies aerosols using OMPS data and created images from them.

"This smoke event is one example that shows that what happens over one area of the Earth can easily affect another area thousands of miles away, whether it's from Asia to North America or North America to Europe, and so on. Not only smoke and dust can get carried long distance. Pollutants, and even disease-carrying spores can be carried by the prevailing winds. For this event, I found out that the smoke plumes were lofted up to at least 12 kilometers (or about 7.5 miles) from the intense heat of the fires. At that point the smoke got picked up by higher level winds," Seftor says. ...

Fires burning in Siberia recently sent smoke across the Pacific Ocean and into the U.S. and Canada. Suomi NPP satellite's Ozone Mapping Profiler Suite tracked aerosols from the fires taking six days to reach America's shores. These false-colored images make the data stand out. The blue and green colors represent less smoke. Yellows and pink represent more smoke. Smoke density is identified by the level of transparency in the coloration. The less dense the smoke is the more you can see through it, and the more dense it is, the less you can see through it. (Credit: NASA/Suomi NPP/Colin Seftor)

Northern Eurasian snowpack could be a predictor of winter weather in US

Science Daily: Every winter, weather forecasters talk about the snow cover in the northern U.S. and into Canada as a factor in how deep the deep-freeze will be in the states. A new study by researchers at the University of Georgia indicates they may be looking, at least partially, in the wrong place. It turns out that snow piling up over a band of frozen tundra from Siberia to far-northern Europe may have as much effect on the climate of the U.S. as the much-better-known El Niño and La Niña.

The new work, just published in the International Journal of Climatology, reports that to understand how cold (or warm) the winter season will be in the U.S., researchers and weather forecasters should also take a closer look at snowpack in northern Eurasia laid down the previous October and November.

"To date, there had been no thorough examination of how snow cover from various regions of Eurasia influences North American winter temperatures," said climatologist Thomas Mote of UGA's department of geography and leader of the research. "The goal of this research was to determine whether there is a significant relationship between autumn snow extent in specific regions of Eurasia and temperatures across North America during the subsequent winter."

…While other scientists have postulated that snow cover on the Eurasian landmass has a strong effect on winters in North America, the new study is the first to narrow down the location of the area that causes the most direct effect on U.S. winters -- an area in northwest Eurasia that includes part of Siberia -- though the entire effective area extends as far west as northern Scandinavia….

View of a pond in Chernoistochinsk Bila, shot by Ляпцев Павел Сергеевич (Pavel Sergeievich Lyapshev), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Fears of fast-spreading deadly fires like in 2010 arise in Russia

CNN: Russia sent emergency fire-fighting aircraft over Siberia's Taiga forests and residential areas to battle 200 new wildfires raging over the past 24 hours, the Emergency Ministry said Saturday. Twenty-two major ones have been reported, officials said. Since summer began, there have more than 5,500 forest fire outbreaks in Siberia, the government agency reported, with 210,000 hectares (518,921 acres) ablaze, three times more than in 2010.

Russian Emergency Minister Sergei Shoigu, who is heading to the affected areas, said the most devastating fires are now raging in remote parts of Central and Eastern Siberia, as well as the Far East. Shoigu said there are concerns of a repeat of last year's disaster, when a persistent drought and fires raged across the country, claiming more than 60 lives, destroying one-third of all crops and forcing Russia to ban grain exports.

"Wildfires (in Siberia) are greater in area compared to last year's fires by more than two times," he told Russian State TV on Saturday. An I1-76 plane, bases at Bratsk airport, has carried out five flights to drop tons of water over the Chunsk district. An amphibious Be-200 and a Mi-8 helicopter are also engaged, Itar-Tass reported.

Siberia Gov. Dmitry Mezentsev has declared a state of emergency in the entire area as the situation appeared to be increasingly "deteriorating," the agency reported….

A 2008 fire in the Altai, in Siberia, shot by Игоревич, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Why build-up of fresh water in Arctic could spell trouble for Britain

Steve Connor in the Independent (UK): Scientists have identified a massive volume of freshwater floating like a cap on the Arctic Ocean, which they believe could suddenly flow into the North Atlantic and affect the warm Gulf Stream that keeps Britain mild in winter and cool in summer.

Studies have shown that a surface layer of fresher water in the Arctic Ocean has increased in volume by about 20 per cent over the past two decades. Scientists believe this is the result of melting sea ice and an increased flow of rivers from Siberia and Canada carrying large volumes of meltwater from permafrost regions.

In the Canada Basin area of the Arctic to the west of Greenland, for instance, scientists are monitoring a huge pool of icy meltwater more than 7,500 cubic kilometres in size, which is about twice the volume of Africa's Lake Victoria. This pool of cold freshwater, which is less dense than the saltier seawater on which it floats, is being kept in its place by circulating winds.

The scientists are concerned that a sudden change in wind patterns might send this fresher water south via the Labrador Current into the North Atlantic where it could interfere with the complex "thermohaline" ocean circulation. These currents, which keep the warm Gulf Stream flowing towards Britain and the rest of north-west Europe, flow between the sea surface and the seabed and are controlled by the relative saltiness of seawater.

"In the past we know that a sudden change in Atlantic currents has happened because of a relatively sudden release of freshwater into the North Atlantic. We can imagine that it could happen again," said Benjamin Rabe, of Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven.

"If that amount of freshwater is going to be suddenly released it would influence ocean currents, for instance the thermohaline circulation of the North Atlantic. I think we should definitely look at this further. The thermohaline ocean current has only been monitored for a few years," he added…

A view of the North Cornish coast looking north east from Widemouth Bay near Bude in Cornwall, UK. Shot by Herbythyme, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Leaking Siberian ice raises a tricky climate issue

Associated Press: Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — at a perilous rate.

Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.

…Climate change moves back to center-stage on Nov. 29 when governments meet in Cancun, Mexico, to try again to thrash out a course of counteractions. But U.N. officials hold out no hope the two weeks of talks will lead to a legally binding accord governing carbon emissions, seen is the key to averting what is feared might be a dramatic change in climate this century.

…[G]lobal warming is amplified in the polar regions. What feels like a modest temperature rise is enough to induce Greenland glaciers to retreat, Arctic sea ice to thin and contract in summer, and permafrost to thaw faster, both on land and under the seabed.

Yet awareness of methane leaks from permafrost is so new that it was not even mentioned in the seminal 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned of rising sea levels inundating coastal cities, dramatic shifts in rainfall disrupting agriculture and drinking water, the spread of diseases and the extinction of species.

"In my view, methane is a serious sleeper out there that can pull us over the hump," said Robert Corell, an eminent U.S. climate change researcher and Arctic specialist. Corell, speaking by telephone from a conference in Miami, said he and other U.S. scientists are pushing Washington to deploy satellites to gather more information on methane leaks….

Sunset in Kuznetsk Alatau, South Siberia, shot by Dmitry A. Mottl, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license