A crater formed in Siberia's permafrost is growing | Hacker News Reader

A crater formed in Siberia's permafrost is growing

bbc.com

123 pointsnsajko104 comments

That title is a bit sensational... there's nothing alarming about this. From the article:

The trigger that led to the crater started in the 1960s. Rapid deforestation meant that the ground was no longer shaded by trees in the warmer summer months. This incoming sunlight then slowly warmed the ground. This was made worse by the loss of cold "sweat" from trees as they transpire, which would have kept the ground cool.

"This combination of less shading and less vapid transpiration led to warming of the ground surface," says Julian Murton of the University of Sussex in the UK.

This isn't related to climate change, and in fact may give us some data that helps to refine climate models. It's unfortunate, but at least (given the trend these days) it's not systemic.

Alarming point was, permafrost has as much of carbon as our atmosphere.

Once they thaw, the temperature skyrockets.

I think at this point, we might need to detonate some hydrogen bombs, just to even out the temperature.

> As more permafrost thaws, more and more carbon is exposed to microbes. The microbes consume the carbon, producing methane and carbon dioxide as waste products. These greenhouse gases are then released into the atmosphere, accelerating warming further.

Yeah, the amount of sequestered carbon that could be released is concerning.

Conifers returning to the area could be our allies in this

Also, the permafrost contains lots of methane which is a much more effective (bad) greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Global_warming_...

Flailing attempts at geoengineering will come later, after it becomes clear to even the thickest person that we're desperately screwed.

And, shortly thereafter, mass extinction of the human race and most other multicellular life.

Probably, yes. It's looking more and more like 'The Great Filter' hypothesis is valid, and the filter is in our relatively near future. That said, I'm sure tardigrades, bacteria, plenty of fungi and the like won't even notice.

The planet has been warmer in the past and supported multicellular life.

That isn't quite the same as the human race with it's current standard of living is it.

"don't worry everyone, there will still be slime in the seas"

Will they? It seems it would just trigger migrations inland away from rising sea levels.

The significant improvements in agricultural technology over the last 100 years likely means it wouldn't significantly impact the ability to grow food in countries rich enough to have the ability to geoengineer in this manner, so it might not happen.

Look at North Africa and the Middle East... so much of the conflict now is driven at least in part by climate change. Where there's desperation for water and food, troubles that might have been just below the surface explode. Climate change isn't just sea levels rising, it's changing climates; some places with desert will green, some green places will turn to desert.

It's already started.

>Look at North Africa and the Middle East... so much of the conflict now is driven at least in part by climate change.

I haven't seen this claim made before, do you have any links to read more? I was under the impression that nearly all of the conflict is driven by things like terrible government structures and ideological extremism (e.g. ISIS).

>Climate change isn't just sea levels rising, it's changing climates; some places with desert will green, some green places will turn to desert.

Right, but that's why I pointed out that countries with advanced agriculture technologies wouldn't be impacted nearly as hard and those are the same countries with the means to geo-engineer.

> I haven't seen this claim made before, do you have any links to read more?

Here you go. Tl;dr: Syria had a longterm drought before the conflict started, leading to rising food prices and about one million Syrians without livelihood by 2011.

https://climateandsecurity.org/2012/02/29/syria-climate-chan...

Syrian Civil War was very much driven by climate.

Essentially a portion of agriculture failed due to drought and a lot of the population fled to the central city, setting off fighting.

You are correct there's a world food surplus so mostly countries with large farming populations would be impacted.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/a-major-contributor...

There's been a number of pieces that bread prices, or water, can be indicators of likely conflict. It's also revealing that so many regimes subsidise wheat prices.

Try this [0] Mother Jones piece on "Bread Prices, A Measure of Political Stability", or one from the Conversation [1].

There was a BBC documentary of 10 years ago. I can't remember the title so haven't found a web link.

[0] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/climate-change-f...

[1] http://theconversation.com/food-security-how-drought-and-ris...

Have a look at http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241

"Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought"

>Abstract

>Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest. We show that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely without this trend. Precipitation changes in Syria are linked to rising mean sea-level pressure in the Eastern Mediterranean, which also shows a long-term trend. There has been also a long-term warming trend in the Eastern Mediterranean, adding to the drawdown of soil moisture. No natural cause is apparent for these trends, whereas the observed drying and warming are consistent with model studies of the response to increases in greenhouse gases. Furthermore, model studies show an increasingly drier and hotter future mean climate for the Eastern Mediterranean. Analyses of observations and model simulations indicate that a drought of the severity and duration of the recent Syrian drought, which is implicated in the current conflict, has become more than twice as likely as a consequence of human interference in the climate system.

Useful reference.

> As described here, water and climatic conditions have played a direct role in the deterioration of Syria’s economic conditions.

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/WCAS-D-13-00059....

As opposed to a hundred years ago when these were thriving places?

You're being sarcastic, but that just shows how much history you still have to learn.

Start with Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq; you don't even have to go back 100 years.

Well, let me get this straight:

Climate change is discovered by scientists.

People with fossil fuel money create fake science and propagate it through the corrupt media, and the people lap it up because they want to believe it (some reason that it would lead to a big government, hence the science can't be true). They're blocking all action for 30 years. They also constantly harass the scientists.

Climate change causes famine around the Mediterranean. Revolutions, civil wars and some tens of millions refugees and illegal immigrants result.

These flow to neighboring countries and even a little to Europe, causing political problems there.

There's potential for much bigger problems. Usually the people responsible are very much not the people suffering the consequences.

Nailed it, except that "tens of millions" could easily climb into, "Over a billion" depending on a number of factors. Then you add in advanced countries panicking and turning to geoengineering and the end accelerates.

Just a week ago, in Australia:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=89683&src=...

Try and geo engineer against 50+ degrees C for weeks.

Plants die at these temperatures and we don't have technology to counter that. At current rate, we've got maybe a couple of years left before heatwaves kill off all vegetation in many parts of the world with all the dire consequences for humans and animals living there.

Unfortunately, it will take total collapse for people to understand that we have an impossible lifestyle - meaning a wrong philosophy about life, nature and each other.

It's not about what we need to do, it's about what we need to stop doing.

And I think that's the impossible task, because that means dismantling our current 'economy' and rebuilding it on new principles, new mathematics, etc.

"Plants die at these temperatures and we don't have technology to counter that."

Actually, we do. Much of that heat is generated because of barren land. The barren land is so because of the regulations that aim to preserve as much of the outback as it is. You say there isn't technology, but one of the possible measures was available for thousands of years. Just plant massively on that land. There are desert plants that resist well enough in that kind of environment and will reduce the amount of heating.

Before starting on me with the dangerous consequences this may cause, just let me assure you that I'm well aware of the recurrent mass fires that occur in much of the continental Aussie and many other problems. I only wish to stress that there is something that can be tried out in the face of the kind of problems you pointed out to. Although I agree that human intervention carries significant aport in the global warming, I think though it merely accelerated a natural process that would have happened anyway. So maybe we don't have to stop doing something (fear-based, self-limiting approach) but try instead to understand and use these natural changes of our world (curiosity-based, exploratory approach). Let's embrace change, or at least give it a chance.

I've always considered myself an ardent but highly pragmatic environmentalist. As such, I have realized that possible useful paths forward are some mass changes, on the scale of those that you describe.

However, I haven't see anything in particular related to, effectively, terraforming most of Australia.

Do you have any citations about the how that might work, and what impact it might have?

David Holmgren - one of the co-developers of Permaculture - produced a book a while back called Trees on The Treeless Plains[1].

The developing of arid lands into something productive (without requiring massive or on-going inputs of energy, nutrients, water, etc) is a common theme among a lot of the big names in Permaculture - you could review some of Geoff Lawton's publications on the work he's been doing in Jordan[2]

FWIW, my experience trying to grow productive trees in areas of Australia with (annual) 3 metre evaporation rates and average 600mm rainfall (with some multi-year droughts) and frequent 45C weeks through the summer period -- the single biggest requirement for success is native animal exclusion while trying to get pioneer trees established.

[1] https://holmgren.com.au/product/treeless-plains/?v=3a1ed7090...

[2] http://permaculturenews.org/2013/11/19/rough-ready-real-nove...

Excellent material, thank you!

Those improvements in agricultural technology nearly all require both cheap fossil fuels and cheap water. It seems unlikely both will be available in an era of rapid climate change.

Uranium is great at producing heat that can be used for all kinds of things like desalination.

This assumes sea level change is the largest hazard of climate change. An increase in severe weather and changes in the climate of arable regions seems like a much larger hazard. Adaptation isn't necessarily the hardest part either - our world order is already in flux with migrants leaving the Middle East and Northern Africa - if people start leaving other regions it's going to be a challenge to maintain order. If people start fleeing countries like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, or Bangladesh en mass due to climate change there will be massive implications for the stability of the region.

Close but not quite - the trigger for change will be falling profits. The powerful few will decide our fate.

Profits don't just fall, the fortunes of some rise while others fall. In the worst case, the fortunes of warlords and tyrants rise. Until the absolute end, there is always someone profiting from human misery.

Wouldn't it make more sense to launch solar shields into orbit?

Yes, but that's beyond our capabilities, nukes aren't.

We've got launch capability, and we've launched solar sails before.

Now we've got to launch either a really massive solar sail or a lot of small ones. And they've got to be really massive or have enough fuel to maintain position.

You could setup the shield around Lagrange point 1 which has the advantage of not creating noticeable rings around the earth. This does not reduce material needed by all that much, but it does prevent kessler syndrome as your sunshade breaks down.

However, a much cheaper option is simply cover large regions of the earth with a reflective coating. Between those extremes are things like hot air balloons in the upper atmosphere.

Or you know, polluting with vast quantities of SOX. You're dreaming too big, and not dirty or dumb enough.

I can't begin to imagine the difference in scale here. Perhaps a solar sail a few million times larger than all the solar sails we've ever launched, combined?

The funny thing is that we'll probably get around to detonating some nuclear weapons, but I doubt it will be in a controlled attempt to avert catastrophe. More like it will be the final act in a series of wars over resources and migration (although who knows how it will be couched politically/popularly). When one group is up against a wall called "annihilation", they'll push the button.

I wonder what would happen if there were a world-wide campaign to plant fast-growing weeds such as hemp? If literally everyone who had access to sunlight and water did it, you might be able to collect enough carbon to make a dent. then you'd have to put them somewhere. I imagine the dried plants could be baled and stored underground. They would still release some CO2 from oxidation but perhaps theres a way to stop that ?

It's not nuclear explosions that cause cooling. It's the firestorms that they cause. So that would be a painful strategy. However, I suppose that it's possible to build devices that created SOX. The hard part would be minimizing the radionuclides.

> The hard part would be minimizing the radionuclides.

Not necessarily. Tsar Bomba, the highest yield device ever detonated, was also among the cleanest because they tampered the third stage with lead instead of U-238.

It was cleaner than their original design, but still a wildly dirty, and stupidly inefficient device.

> stupidly inefficient device.

Any idiot can say that in 2017.

In 1967 you'd have to special kind of idiot to discount it as ineffective.

No, idiots are still impressed by big explosions. There's a reason it was scaled down from 100 MT, and even then it was known to be a waste, it used no new tech, was not practically deliverable, and oh yes... much of the blast energy just shot up and out into the stratosphere. How useful. It was designed to be a political statement as part of Cold War politics, and it was known by even its designers then that it was a silly fucking thing to be doing. To be honest, most nuclear testing by that point fell into the, "Silly fucking thing to be doing category..." but idiots still haven't figured that out.

If they'd had a Pacific test site, they might well have gone with 100 MT.

I suspect that you're right, although I hope that sanity might have prevailed. It's hard to imagine the damage the uranium liner + 50 megatons would have done to that ecosystem.

Of course if the US hadn't been experiencing so much political upheaval, they might have tried responding in kind.

Sanity ;)

The global nuclear arsenal is still over 2500 MT, I bet :(

I wish the North Koreans would get that memo.

The sad fact is that they kind of are the exception to that rule. Kind of. They actually need to test to develop their weapons, and they want the weapons to ensure continuity of their regime, but also to sell the tech (probably). It's a pretty evil/batshit thing to be doing I grant you, but... if they want nukes despite that, they at least need to test.

The crazy bastards.

It was so large there was no feasible way to even transport such a device other than maybe building it on a suicide ship.

It was purely a dick measuring contest at that point.

> It was so large there was no feasible way to even transport such a device other than maybe building it on a suicide ship.

Why is that not feasible? If they could get it on a submarine they could detonate in most of the worlds major cities.

Most of the world's major cities are not under water AFAIK.

No, but most of the largest cities are coastal, and you are somewhat more likely to get into a harbour with a hostile sub than with a hostile warship.

I really doubt that. I can't imagine that the US and the UK for example, don't have sonar networks and other means to detect subs. It might be nearly impossible to track a boomer in open ocean, but they're not designed for littoral operations and sonar networks are much more effective there. You also have to cope with an airforce and patrolling navy.

All in all, you're mostly likely to nuke the nearby ocean, rendering it mostly a radiological/environmental weapon. When you consider that you can far more easily launch a combined 100MT in smaller payloads, with a higher resulting degree of destruction than a single 100MT warhead...

The key phrase being "somewhat more likely".

I'm not arguing effectiveness. I was arguing against the "not under water" bit, after the person you responded to suggested a sub over a ship.

I'm sure they could detect the sub, but the also have to be able to identify it as hostile and act before it can reach the city, which can take much longer. I also wonder if it's possible to "hide" under a cargo ship to escape detection?

But at that point ~1/2 your detonation is over the ocean and useless. Further, unless you surface the water will dramatically reduce the bombs effectiveness.

You're still going to do a lot better than approaching with a ship that is plainly visible to anyone, and which will be taken out before it gets anywhere close, was the point.

Sure, but an ICBM with a single 10MT detonation would be dramatically better than both as you want it up in the air and over the population center. Remember the closet km is always gone, it's a question of what appens further out that's important. And thus you don't want a line of buildings to protect anything.

Maybe, but I was not discussing whether or not it was practical.

In warfare it's only the practical things that really matter. You might attach a grenade launcher, but you don't give people double barreled rifles.

If your target is the city/population. If it's the president then a surprise attack would be better, although I doubt a nuke carrying enemy sub would be able to get that close.

Peak speed for an ICBM is in the ballpark of 6-7km/s (any faster and the payload would go orbital), and it takes about 10 minutes to accelerate to that speed. That's New York to Moscow in around 20 minutes.

So, a sub 1,000 miles from shore can hit you faster than you can get out of the blast range when you include a modest detection > reaction delay unless your sitting in an airport. It's vaguely possible you could get into a bunker in that time period, but unless you sleep in a bunker even that's not really viable.

However, by setting up things to respond in the event of a nuclear attack it does not really matter if you take out DC / Moscow as the other subs can respond anyway.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant that it would be hard to design a device that released lots of SOX without also releasing lots of radioactive stuff. The simplest idea is an S-32 "casing". The good thing is that S-35 is the most stable sulfur isotope, with a half-life of 87.4 days. But I don't know what other products would be.

Chlorine. Just Chlorine.

So you get normal Cl-35 from S-35 by beta decay.

Can you get Cl-36 from S-32 by neutron capture?

Actually you get 32-Phosporous from that. If you want 36-Cl you need cosmic rays interacting with 36-Ar, 39-K, 40-Ca, or neutron activation of 35-Cl.

Doh. S-32 + n -> P-32 + p

And then P-32 decays back to S-32 with ~14 day half-life.

I wonder if people are working on this. It'd be a minor tweak to nuclear weapons models.

The problem is that you're still going to end up with plenty of fallout from "unburned" Uranium and various byproducts. That pollution won't be especially associated with the S you want, but it's going to produced alongside it regardless.

I was thinking of devices with ~100 tons sulfur each, lofted near the stratosphere in blimps. That yields persistent sulfur aerosols to decrease insolation. And yes, one challenge would be minimizing radionuclide production.

I wonder if a slower, but maybe safer alternative is just to increase the burning of SOX producing fuels. If we could scrub the carbon, we'd have a net-cooling effect.

That or we have to seriously consider induced volcanism.

The problem is that ground-level SOX gives you acid rain, and washes out too fast to be useful for GCC mitigation. Increasing volcanism would arguably be even iffier than nuclear sulfur blimps.

Good point about the acid rain, the washout. I wonder if there's some way to dope solid rocket booster fuel to produce SOX at higher altitudes? As we launch more and more, maybe we could harness that to ease the burden on something like your blimp idea... thus avoiding the need to nuke the planet.

I was just riffing on the nuclear winter thing. But actually, blimps would be unworkable, because we would need to inject millions of tons of SOX per year into the stratosphere. And energy requirements are mostly for lifting, not dispersion.

Perhaps nuclear devices could be designed to produce upward-directed jets.

> This isn't related to climate change

sure it is, read the whole article.

The amount of potential methane locked away in the Siberian and Canadian permafrost is frightening. However the amount of potential methane locked into the continental shelf seabed is down right terrifying.

If these two sources of greenhouse gases begin to form a positive feedback loop humanity is going to feel a world of hurt. It would lead us down a climate change road which we cannot recover from.

Hypothetically we're completely screwed already and nothing we do at this point matters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

I wonder if it would be possible to harness these methane reserves for energy production?

That's basically what Natural Gas is. While it appears to burn the "cleanest" out of the fossil fuels, it still releases CO2 emmisions.

Right.

Many roots of the modern environmental movement trace back to the early 70s where smog in US cities was a thick, visible and almost always present irritant. That, and burning rivers.

Very few of us had a clear understanding of global warming and climate change at the time. Indeed, some brief panicked warnings of an impending ice age have been endlessly presented and re-presented as proof that climate science is bogus.

The term 'clean' was really all about particulate emissions. The shit that polluted the air and the water in visible ways.

CO2 and methane missions are invisible and odorless, and so weren't really considered at the time.

I'm not an expert on chemistry, but I believe that CO2 pretty much HAS to come out of any energy producing reaction of fossil fuels.

This lines up with my understanding of the history as well.

And actually, I found an article on phys.org that says to the contrary[0]! I was surprised myself.

>Instead of burning methane (CH4), its molecular components, hydrogen (H2) and carbon (C), can be separated in a process called 'methane cracking'. This reaction occurs at high temperatures (750°C and above) and does not release any harmful emissions.

https://phys.org/news/2015-11-energy-fossil-fuel-carbon-diox...

sure, but that still releases the co2. at least you get something useful from the co2 though.

Related images and discussion here:

http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/n0678-200000...

http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/n0127-dozens...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9120690

The Batagaika crater on Google maps:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Batagaika+Crater/@67.58752...

There are a lot of lakes around that look like craters, just filled with water.

Maybe 'crater' is a wrong term to apply to this formation.

TFA:

We found several layers of buried soils. Two of them look especially promising. They show that thousands of years ago the climate in the region of Verkhoyansk was the same as it is now, and even warmer.

For anyone who doesn't catch Destination Unknown (TV series), this was a prominent feature in an episode... while its a bad sign for the climate in general, it's at least unlocking 300,000 years of geology and archeology to discover, specifically Wooly Mammoths

I can't wait till they bring back one of those! Amazing on so many levels.

Melting permafrost exposes ancient organics. I wonder if ancient plants or microorganisms can revive because of this? Or ancient viruses/deceases?

Actually this has already happened with the Pithovirus which was discovered in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pithovirus

This virus is also interesting because it is orders of magnitude larger than previously known viruses.

The main cause of destruction in Ballard's The Drowned World (1962) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drowned_World was the accelerated erosion due to melting permafrost after a global warming event. Raising sea levels was minor in comparison.

The original cause of global warming was not increasing methane or CO2 levels but solar tempests. We had other concerns back then. Interestingly the novel is set in 2145, which is not entirely impossible if we want to project the current trend to meet that ending.

Favorite line: "For example, 125,000 years ago, the climate was going through an interglacial period, during which it was several degrees warmer than it is now."

And yet people keep saying our current conditions are unprecedented...

It's unprecedented to experience that change with a population of 7 billion. 125,000 years ago we didn't have millions of people totally reliant upon just in time food shipped in from distant locations or have massive settlements in areas significantly affected by climate change.

and the rate of warming was orders of magnitude slower.

That is correct, the rate of change right now is unprecedented by several orders of magnitude, saving for a couple of events in the last 1 billion years, caused by similarly unusual circumstances, during which mass extinctions occurred, which is why there is concern.

Article include hilarious hydrology misquote of the day: "vapid transpiration".

are we in global warming or global cooling? it seems the scientists or the media change this around every now and then, which in turn they now call it just climate change.

I don't know if there truly is an actual consensus in the scientific community, but it is true that an aggregate warming of the earth as a whole will cause some hot spots to become cooler, and some cool spots to warm, some deserts to recover, and some wet regions to loose their rainfall. "Change" is a good word.

In particular it's the case that some of Antarctica has been cooling: http://www.asoc.org/advocacy/climate-change-and-the-antarcti...

Change is a good word, except when it causes the general public to be confused about what the average is (warming.)

Sea ice coverage in Antarctica is interesting.

Until the last couple of years, it's been at all-time highs, but it has crashed big-time: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-i... click over to Antarctica.

The trend is warmer. The local effects are highly variable as weather patterns are severely impacted by these changes.

Warmer means more energy, and more energy means more chaos.

The consensus has been on warming for as long as any sort of consensus has existed, about 40-50 years now.

If you'd done the slightest amount of investigation you'd know this and wouldn't be parroting the standard science-denier line.

"Global Cooling" was briefly proposed in the 70's to explain why temperatures seemed to have gone down from WWII to them. It was later attributed to aerosols from pollution blocking some sunlight. It was never a consensus on the climatologist community but got attention due to news articles that missed the details and ambiguity of the proposal. It often gets brought up by climate change deniers and that may be why you think you've heard about it more than once.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

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