[at-l] FYI - Siberia Melts

[janl2 at mindspring.com (Jan Leitschuh)]

  > http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/081105EA.shtml

Climate Warning as Siberia Melts
     By Fred Pearce
     NewScientist.com

     Thursday 11 August 2005

     The world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area 
stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of 
western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground 
melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.

     The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany 
combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent 
greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

     The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world's 
least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at 
Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University 
of Oxford.

     Kirpotin describes an "ecological landslide that is probably 
irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He 
says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to 
melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

     What was until recently a featureless expanse of frozen peat is 
turning into a watery landscape of lakes, some more than a kilometre 
across. Kirpotin suspects that some unknown critical threshold has 
been crossed, triggering the melting.
More.
  > http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/081105EA.shtml

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