Thawing permafrost is destroying Arctic cities (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Thawing permafrost is destroying Arctic cities (2016)

theguardian.com

128 pointsperfunctory30 comments

Apparently there's tech called a thermosyphon to keep permafrost under foundations frozen.

https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/nvmms.sci.phys.pe...

That's mentioned in the article, alright:

> If temperature monitoring or visible deformations tip maintenance workers off in time, structures can be saved. Thermosyphons were installed to cool the soil under the apartment block at 36 Nansen Street when temperature probes showed warming there, for instance.

> But sometimes changes come too suddenly. A brick office building on Komsomolskaya street cracked like an egg one September morning in 2009 and stands empty to this day. A top corner of the building pitched forward 70cm, sending jagged fissures up the middle of its facade and squashing windows.

Interestingly, "termosifone" is the Italian word for the cast-iron radiator, used to heat homes.

>To avoid this, in the 1960s builders of apartment blocks in Norilsk began drilling holes up to 100-ft deep and pouring reinforced concrete piles that stuck into the permanently frozen soil below.

100ft would be enough for quite some time. From my short stints in the construction industry (specializing in foundations) in Siberia during college summers (“stroyotryad”) 30 years ago I don’t remember anything being done to the full specs and without cutting corners. Using full power of my imagination I still can’t picture somebody doing it 100ft there when 30ft would look the same :)

The article seems to suggest as much -- the real issue is excess moisture causing re-frozen soil to expand more than it should, damaging the upper portions of the piles. I can hardly imagine that an extra two feet of thawing alone are affecting the stability of piles 100 feet deep.

While they will may have temporary problems in places I suspect Siberia will be a long term winner from climate change.

All the people displaced from flooded coastal settlements have to move somewhere after all.

There aren’t going to be long term winners from climate change. They might be less affected but it’s not going to be good. New illnesses, food scarcity and other things will only make some places “winnings” a relative thing.

Would you consider a tornado that levels your house a long term winner for your basement?

No, there are places that are borderline unhabitable now that will become more livable as the climate warms. Here's one study:

http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/jmp2265/?page_id=48

As a tangible example, Greenland is now starting to be warm enough to grow potatoes:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6993612.stm

Isn't the methane release going to accelerate the warming exponentially to the point of mass-extintion? The so-called feedback effect. Permafrost is thawing 70 years before the simplistic models predicted:

- https://www.livescience.com/65709-arctic-permafrost-melts-de...

- https://envisionation.co.uk/index.php/nick-breeze/203-subsea...

Also, there is Nitrous Oxide too, which will deplete the Ozone layer:

- https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/06/harvard-chemi...

I'm not qualified to comment on whether Earth will eventually end up looking like Venus, I'm just pointing out that in the short term there will be places that gain from climate change as well.

I think it's pretty safe to say that Earth will not end up looking like Venus from a simple fact that there were times in its history when greenhouse gas concentrations were much higher than even the wildest projections you'd see today, and yet here we are. Now granted, there weren't any people back then, but the planet did not turn into Venus.

They're not going to be so nice when they're at the other end of a four-billion-person refugee crisis in a few decades.

If we continue our current path it seems likely that the ecosystem collapses hard enough that even places where the climate becomes nicer for humans will be hard to inhabit, for example because phytoplankton in the oceans dies off and we run out of oxygen.

There will be winners and losers from climate change.

Likely a lot more losers than winners.

But denying that there will be winners too is as misguided as denying climate change in the first place.

In this case winners are tied to places, so yes moving will be often the only sensible option.

Is Siberia the perfect place to move to? We'll find out (or rather our descendants will) But they're unlikely to be the losers at least

Unless that article about those 2 scientists from the 50's is correct, and the rising oceans will allow free circulation between the atlantic, arctic, and pacific leading to massive snowfall on arctic land masses creating 2 mile high glaciers and causing the next ice age.

> All the people displaced from flooded coastal settlements have to move somewhere after all.

Land is not really the issue at hand. Even disregarding the entire infrastructural issue, Siberia has no fertile soil. When the temperate breadbaskets and rice bowls start failing, the subarctic regions won't be able to take up the slack.

They could be a "long term winner" 50 weeks out of the year, and have a more mild climate than before, but have hurricanes or flash floods much worse than anything before the other two weeks and not really be better off.

2016 article, entertaining Guardian comment thread below

Ah thanks. Added above.

The problem is as old as permafrost itself: I remember reading as a child about problems with permafrost stability (or rather lack thereof) when they were building БАМ (Baikal-Amur Mainline). They'd lay tracks only to watch them be torn by permafrost movement a year or two (or sometimes a month) later. Somehow they did figure out how to make things stable enough for the railway to be operational. It is currently being upgraded to double the capacity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikal%E2%80%93Amur_Mainline

The problem is getting worse very fast. While the permafrost was always somewhat unstable , what is happening now is unprecedented.

Hard to weep for the most polluted city in the world about this.

Yet another alarmist article stretching to find a relationship with our man-made climate change.

It is sowing doubt instead. Press (especially the far-left Guardian) should think twice publishing this. There are much better indicators such as bleaching of corals and global satellite measurements.

All those ancient prions, viruses and bacteria that the world have not been exposed to for eons, now floating in the air and water, may very well be the best solution to the human overpopulation problem.

It's very unlikely. This article goes into more detail:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/01/24/5759742...

The summary is that most of those viruses and bacteria are long dead, and in those cases where something was frozen recently enough to still be viable, you'd most likely need to go to extreme lengths - like "kneeling in defrosted marine mammal goo" - to get infected by it.

So like how Ebola spreads got it, not very improbable at all

Dead viruses and bacteria are resurrected just be being exposed to a single live version of itself

You'll notice there's not much Ebola in the world. Despite the sensationalist "Hot Zone" journalism around it, it's not a serious threat in first world countries.

The reason is precisely because the precautions one needs to take to avoid it are just basic hygiene that we take for granted.

> Dead viruses and bacteria are resurrected just be being exposed to a single live version of itself

Did you read the article I linked? Perhaps you should have told that to the scientists who tried but failed to culture frozen organisms.

If they can't culture it in a lab, then the chances of it reviving on its own in the wild are very low.

I can't believe we're discussing a literal X-Files plot as though it's scientifically realistic.

> Did you read the article I linked? Perhaps you should have told that to the scientists who tried but failed to culture frozen organisms.

I missed that part. Pretty cool

It still only takes 1 live compatible one to come in contact with the frozen organism that still has enough biological data intact. There are so many organisms in the soil that we don't know about such that I don't consider it improbable.

If ongoing risk from those ancient pathogens were anywhere close to being real, then every year when old glacial mountain ice melts and feeds the streams on which so many areas depend, there would also be serious disease outbreaks and epidemics in those areas. But that doesn't happen. Also, the scientists who drill into ancient ice and pull out cores and handle them freely would also face similar issues. But again that doesn't happen.

Another thing to keep in mind is that, even if there were surviving pathogens in that old ice, generally we are the descendants of folks who survived exposure to those pathogens at some point in the past. So it may very well be in our genes to mostly just shrug off exposure to them today.

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