Stocks of vulnerable carbon twice as high where permafrost subsidence is factored in
Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - 11:44
in Earth & Climate
New research from a team at Northern Arizona University suggests that subsidence, gradually sinking terrain caused by the loss of ice and soil mass in permafrost, is causing deeper thaw than previously thought and making vulnerable twice as much carbon as estimates that don't account for this shifting ground. These findings, published this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, suggest traditional methods of permafrost thaw measurement underestimate the amount of previously-frozen carbon unlocked from warming permafrost by over 100 percent.