New 50-metre deep crater opens up in Arctic tundra
siberiantimes.com
siberiantimes.com
It'd be nice if its wikipedia page was updated to reflect this best available science. (Quickly scanning its /Talk: page, I can't make heads or tails of its current status. Sorry.)
So am I understanding correctly that this is basically a popped methane bubble that had formed inside the permafrost? I wonder what the greenhouse gas impact of this was.
However, it's a sign of melting permafrost on a wide scale that is releasing methane, and that does have an impact which will get more pronounced.
Because methane is more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2, there's a risk of a runaway feedback cycle melting more permafrost and releasing more greenhouse gases. And that's not thinking about the colossal amounts of frozen methane on the sea floor which is quite sensitive to temperature changes. We're playing with fire here, sorta literally.
It's horrifying to think about the escalating crises of global ecosystems. In a world, where too many people can't even be bothered to wear a mask during an ongoing pandemic I have zero confidence in preventing an extinction level disaster where the truly severe consequences aren't felt for another 2 generations. Some people just do not care if it doesn't directly affect them right this very second.
It's sociopathy on another scale.
I do think, however, that we're living in a "golden age" and that it will come to an end somewhat abruptly. Many people will probably die but we're not going to go extinct.
I share your concern regarding the inability of so many people (at least in the USA) to perform the simple task of wearing a mask for communal good. It does not bode well for community engagement on totally revamping people's lifestyles to help mitigate climate change (I can imagine the foaming at the mouth that would occur with many people around where I live - Austin - if the government instituted a gasoline car buyback program in exchange for hybrids, as a simple example.)
Imagine if we had a way to magically make everything more expensive to people who don't wear masks :)
Also, even if everyone were willing to make the necessary changes voluntarily, I wouldn't have much confidence in our ability to accurately calculate which actions have the most impact on our climate footprint, without involving market mechanisms in some way. We'd probably focus on stuff that feels important over stuff that's mundane but actually has a much bigger impact. As an example, I'm kinda thinking of people who do that "zero-waste" thing (refers to landfill waste), which is fine, but you can live "zero waste" and still have a pretty substantial climate footprint, and vice-versa.
I agree that aligning economic incentives is a good (and probably the only?) way to steer hordes of people in directions that will either help or harm the "community".
I'm not actually sure whether most people are or aren't wearing masks. While driving out to camp in the desert, stops to get gas provided (very limited anecdata) that people generally don't care at all about mask wearing. Which is why I think it was the right move where I live to force businesses to deny service to people not wearing masks but these people tend to only do it in settings where they become pariahs if they don't (so they're only doing it to conform, which is better than not at all). e.g. in some places, the people running the place don't even care so therefore it goes unenforced (if not procedurally, definitely not socially).
I also agree with your concern about our/my/your ability to accurately estimate anything of importance. But this isn't a good reason alone for not encouraging thinking and care about these things, even if it means reeducation later on (harm reduction as opposed to some form of "getting it perfect", which is exceedingly hard).
However there is one important point: moving people cognitively towards thinking about these issues in a moral framework of care and purity is probably better than not, even if it means slightly more carbon output due to higher calorie consumption because of bicycle riding instead of driving a car (e.g. I support a carbon tax much more now than I did before I got rid of my car, it wasn't a cause mind you but it certainly co-occurred with my beginning to care more about the sanctity of our natural environment).
So, I agree with you generally, but we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking only in terms of economic or technological solutions because not focusing on the social domain can have consequences (read: conservatives now becoming science deniers and buying gas guzzling trucks to stick it to the libs, for example).
You get debated on "extinction" when you might technically be wrong because a handful of people might be left but the planet will have still been rendered inhospitable for most.
You're absolutely correct, it is sociopathy on another scale.
This is true even after you take into account the fact that CO2 is nearly 3 times as massive as CH4.
> In April 2010, the President of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, visited the site and ordered that the hole should be closed. In 2013, he declared the part of the Karakum Desert with the crater a nature reserve. In 2019, he appeared on state television doing doughnuts around the crater to disprove rumours of his death.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=Darvaza&atb=v209-1&iax=imag...
Maybe the herbivores avoid the leaking gas area or the methane bubble warms or fertilizes the soil (providing nitrogen somehow)
It doesn't seem to be anything special. On the wider shot closer to the ground (5th picture, with a bunch of people standing next to the crater) you can see that the mix of shrubs and more bare / grassy ground spreads to the horizon.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Yamal+Peninsula/@69.559821...
[1] https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-are-sinkholes-round-1614203510
peat of made of decaying moss
moss is permeable like a sponge
sponges can hold stuff
stuff can change state with changes in temp/pressure
stuff in a new state can occupy increased volume
increased volume can cause increased pressure
increasing pressure increases temperature
changing the state of more stuff ...
(wavefront) path of least resistance contains most square inches with least circumference
That way you can separate points and make them more readable (punctuation also helps).
In this case you have gas and mud.
> The craters appear because ‘gas-saturated cavities are formed in the permafrost…
> "In a literal sense, a void space filled with gas with high pressure. The covering layer distends, the thickness of which is 5-10 metres approximately."
> Explosions have happened in swelling pingos, or mounds in the tundra which erupts when the gas builds up under a thick cap of ice.
https://meduza.io/ - also has an English version.
https://theins.ru/ - these are the ones who deanonymized Salisbury poisoners.
https://zona.media/ - focuses on the judicial, law enforcement and penal system. A lot of very dark and depressing news.
https://www.proekt.media/ - rare but deep investigations.
> Blocks of soil and ice thrown hundreds of metres from epicentre of the funnel at the Yamal peninsula.
Could these be detected by Remote Sensing images from satellites, assuming they would be taking pictures of the tundra at high enough resolution and frequency.
Or has it just been missed?
I'm not speaking of those who weigh the consequences of lockdowns or debate the viral reproductivity. I mean the people who outright deny what is happening right in front of their faces. Those who have easy access to good information, and ignore it in order to seek out bad information.
There's just no way something such as climate change, which is much more abstract, will get that kind of buy in from this kind of populace. Even if you got everyone to agree on it, we'd hear the familiar debate; "we shouldn't be forced to cut our emissions until country Y does it first". And conversely, "why does our poor country have to suffer from these restrictive limits when the rich world profited off their pollution for decades?"
You need to convince the rich countries first. And since US is the richest, it can have an enormous influence on the world.
I think people in the US know that, and that’s one of the reasons there are so many deniers. If Malta goes green - well who cares, if the US puts its entire cultural, political, economical and military will on it - things will start to change. We can’t have that.
The people I see speaking about this believe either there is no virus, or it’s overblown- and most or all of the deaths are either misattributed car accidents and natural cause deaths, or made up from whole cloth. Doctors and hospitals are supposedly being compensated to falsely report deaths as having been caused by COVID.
Obviously there are not large numbers of misattributed deaths or hospital conspiracies. This mirrors the theory held by basically the same people that climate change is just something used to push a political agenda and that scientists fake the data for grant money.
This one's the weirdest. If I had climate science credentials and wanted to cash in I'd be shilling for oil companies. Like that old Tom Lehrer joke about a doctor who specialized in diseases of the rich.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/1912-article-global-warmin...
But even without someone from 1912 looking at simple chemistry before there was heavier politics and cognitive dissonance involved, what we are concerned about is a lack of replacement for the ecosystems we rely on, and even just animals that we like rely on.
It's almost fine if the earth goes through its own climate cycles, but it is not fine if it doesn't include us and things we like, and when we can also prevent it by cutting emissions and using energy differently while generating energy differently.
For example, with coral reefs, we are looking at chronic failures and subsequently adjustments of entire ecosystems and ocean currents and weather patterns, solely because there isn't a replacement phytoplankton to help the corals regulate better.
From this poll https://www.newsmax.com/us/us/2020/05/19/id/968005/:
73% of Americans polled say climate change is happening.
54% of Americans asked say they are extremely or very certain climate change is happening.
62% of Americans say they agree with the scientific view that global warming is mostly caused by human activity.
6% of Americans surveyed say there were extremely or very sure global warming wasn’t happening.
Which is why, if the current POTUS is re-elected and continues to throw the Country and the Federal Government into chaos, I have little hope that it will be addressed.
It wasn’t just the president who said that, it was also the medical establishment a few months ago. They told people not to wear masks because they were afraid of shortages that would affect hospital supplies. They lied to the public rather than being honest about it. That sort of behaviour is extremely damaging to the public trust in experts.
The backpedaling with respect to masks is not due to changes in our understanding of the virus, whatsoever.
No. The claim was that masks were effective only when used by trained hospital personnel, which is still true. It was not clear if they would be effective when used by non trained hospital staff, and it was also not clear if non n95 masks (like cloth masks) would be effective at all. Once it was determined that they were effective, the advisory was changed to reflect that.
There was no backpedaling, only an increase in understanding which resulted in an update to guidance.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-...
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commenta...
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/07/commenta...
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/podcasts-webinars/specia...
You see economics driving progress in lots of sectors. There is good reason to be hopeful here because e.g. he most valuable car company is now a battery EV company (Tesla) and the fastest growing electricity companies are all over solar and wind. Farmers are going organic because they have better margins on selling good quality produce. High tech farming meanwhile includes using clean energy to intensive green house growing, vertical farming, and better resource management. Likewise the construction sector is figuring out cheaper and cleaner materials (e.g. wood instead of concrete seems to be becoming a thing). Profits are shifting from companies doing damage to companies undoing damage.
There are no silver bullets here but the effects can be quite rapid. E.g. the coal sector collapsing in the space of about 10-15 years is driven by economics not idealism. It certainly helps that people like the side effect of less pollution but the main driver there is $/kwh. Investors are voting with their feet at this point. Either way, some good old R&D and healthy profit has achieved more in recent years than decades of lobbying by environmentalists.
Places like China, India, etc. are all doing their thing and mostly it's just driven by economics. That's fine. China seems to be particularly good at figuring things out that are both profitable and helpful here. You see India copying a lot of that.
Economic profit does not favor ecology. No one would have invested into the R&D of wastewater processing unless the state threatens them with an economic equivalence of a death-sentence. Nowadays waste-water processing might be a boom market where profits can be made, but that is not some free market force that is independent from decades of lobbying.
From my observation over the last few decades, when people are frightened they vote for self-proclaimed strongmen.
Back in the '00s when I was taking an interest there was a kind of general belief that the first really incontrovertible "we must do something" events[1] would happen in the '30s and, by and large, governments would act in an uncooperative, zero-sum way internationally, and focus on helping their cronies domestically.
I haven't seen reasons to change that view yet.
[1] For example, extreme heatwaves that each kill more than a million people directly, or simultaneous harvest failure in two or more of the five major grain-growing regions of the world, two or more years in a row, and consequently tens to hundreds of millions of refugees on the move.
How many more scary warning signs will we need to see before taking climate change seriously?
greenhouse [IR trap] increase of
emissions -------------> global temperatures
^ |
| [methane from |
| melting permafrost] |
-------------------------
The atmosphere is like a clogged toilet, you can do your business it in only two or three times before you end up with a mess everywhere. And even if you only use it once going into the bathroom will be unpleasant. Right now it's like a family of 5 is arguing at breakfast if they can use it whenever they feel like it, or only once a day.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills listening to people argue if we should limit our emissions to 90s level by 2050. We should be at zero now, and working on CO2 extraction from the atmosphere if we want to have a planet that can sustain industrial civilization in a century.
Playing around with renewables and batteries completely misses the point. We need fission power plants yesterday and going full steam ahead on hot fusion plants today. Even if we build nothing but Chernobyl style plants and one blows up every two weeks, we will still kill fewer people in the long term than if we continue the way we are now, and that's with the rosiest renewable power projections that ignore things like base load.
Or we need environmentalists to stop attacking nuclear power.
Nuclear: yes, it’s a huge shame that nuclear is in decline. Not sure how much is due to environmentalists over people being generally scared of the technology. The Fukushima disaster didn’t help its popularity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_anti-nuclear_mo...
The current crater is possible because the tundra is lots of frozen mud with gas in it. Gets warm, bubbles form, gas goes out. Edit: The gas is the result of biomass decaying. The cold had stopped the process for thousands of years but when the environment gets warmer, the bacteria activates and resumes the process.