Sunlight Releases Carbon Dioxide From Thawing Arctic Permafrost Soil

Not Fun For Everyone: Sunlight Releases Carbon Dioxide From Thawing Arctic Permafrost Soil

Climate change is fact, not fiction. But climate change takes on a whole new dimension with recent scientific findings indicating that the sunlight and not bacteria lead to the release of carbon dioxide from thawing Arctic permafrost soil. Scientists have found that the permafrost in the Arctic locks away carbon reservoirs. But the carbon changes to carbon dioxide in a process that is caused by sunlight and not bacteria.

This has initiated a debate among climate hange scientists as to what degree the permafrost will thaw and how quickly the warming soils will now release heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air. Researchers had so far been under the impression that bacteria cause the release of this greenhouse gas into the Arctic environment but recent results have revealed that the real culprit is the sunlight.

Scientists are now going to try and unearth the mechanisms by wich organic soil carbon can be converted into carbon dioxide gas. Researchers had so far believed that bacteria was the reason behind the phenomenon when the actual reason was literally before their very eyes.

The study published in the journal Science has been conducted by University of Michigan researchers who have scientifically demonstrated that it is sunlight and not microbial activity which controls the production of this gas in the Arctic inland waters.

“Our results suggest that sunlight, rather than biological processes, controls the fate of carbon released from thawing permafrost soils into Arctic surface waters," aquatic geochemist Rose Cory who is the primary researcher has been quoted as saying.

This finding is not without its precedents. The same research team had also reported last year that recently exposed carbon from thawed Alaskan permafrost is also excessively sensitive to sunlight and can be very quickly changed to carbon dioxide. The studies then suggest "we're likely to see more carbon dioxide released from thawing permafrost than people had previously believed," Cory has estimated.

"We're able to say that because we now know that sunlight plays a key role and that carbon released from thawing permafrost is readily converted to carbon dioxide once it's exposed to sunlight," she was quoted as having added.

Considering that worldwide permafrost soils have twice the amount of carbon as compared to that in the atmosphere, climate change models will now have to consider this while trying to predict the timing and extent of global warming build-up due to GHG emissions.

Through a process called photodegradation, photochemical oxidation or photochemical processing rather than bacterial respiration, more carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere. Creation of more of this gas is a further dent for those who keep calling global warming a scam. It may be easy to silence the activists, but the scientists are a different kettle of fish. Scientifically demonstrable facts can counter any fiction, no matter how enthralling the tale may be. So, spin doctors for the fossil fuel industry can chew over this as they watch global average temperatures rise by 0.8 degree celsius and glaciers melt away killing the rivers and leaving only destruction behind.

"Carbon in thawing permafrost soils may have global impacts on climate change, yet controls on its processing and fate have been poorly understood," study co-author George Kling has been quoted as saying "Our study shows that photochemical processing of soil carbon is an important, newly measured component of the Arctic carbon budget."

"This new understanding is really critical because if we want to get the right answer about how the warming Arctic may feedback to influence the rest of the world, we have to understand the controls on carbon cycling,” chief scientific investigator Rose Cory has been quoted as saying.