Drunken Trees: Dramatic Signs of Climate Change

[NickB79]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140417-drunken-trees-melting-permafrost-global-warming-science/

Sarah James, an Alaska Native elder, says global warming is radically changing her homeland. Even the forests no longer grow straight. Melting ground has caused trees to tilt or fall.

"Because permafrost melts, it causes a lot of erosion," says James, who lives in Arctic Village, a small Native American village in northeastern Alaska. "A lot of trees can't stand up straight. If the erosion gets worse, everything goes with it."

Permafrost is permanently frozen ground. But climate change has caused much of that ground to melt at an unprecedented rate. The ground buckles and sinks, causing trees to list at extreme angles.

Sometimes the trees survive the stress and continue growing, uprighting themselves to vertical. Other times they collapse or drown from rising water tables as subterranean ice melts. Because such trees seem to stagger across the landscape, people often call them "drunken trees."

I remember reading about "drunken forests" in Siberia over a decade ago, so this isn't a new phenomenon.

[SheilaT]

1. I do understand that much of the climate change is man made.

But I have a deeper question connected to the fact that climate does change over time. When the earth has warmed in the past, and permafrost has melted, do we know exactly what happened in those places that had permafrost?

[MFM008]

2. probably extinction

all the methane seeping from the melting ground. There has been 5 great extinctions it would be nuts to think there will not be more.

[SheilaT]

3. There is good reason to think that we are currently

in the middle of the 6th great extinction.

I think it's too simple just to say that permafrost melting would cause a great extinction. Surely there have been permafrosts in the past, and permafrost meltings that don't simply coincide with an extinction event.

I think what I'm trying to figure out here is that I know life adapts. What is the adaptation that goes along with permafrost melting? I realize that probably no one here reading my question actually knows the answer, and that's okay, because I'm constantly thinking about all sorts of odd things like this.

I read as much as I can on things like climate and epidemiology and I'm totally fascinated by those things.

[NickB79]

4. The key is probably the rate of warming

Which would correlate directly to the rate at which the permafrost would give up it's greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as it thaws.

A slow warm-up, and the planet could sequester the methane and CO2 released over thousands of years.

A fast warm-up, and the "burp" of gases overwhelms the natural systems.

And we're currently in a very, very fast warm-up: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/todays-climate-change-proves-much-faster-than-changes-in-past-65-million-years/

The climate is changing at a pace that's far faster than anything seen in 65 million years, a report out of Stanford University says.

The amount of global temperature increase and the short time over which it's occurred create a change in velocity that outstrips previous periods of warming or cooling, the scientists said in research published in today's Science.

If global temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next century, the rate will be about 10 times faster than what's been seen before, said Christopher Field, one of the scientists on the study. Keeping the temperature increase that small will require aggressive mitigation, he said.

So even our best-case scenario (+1.5C by 2100) is a warming event 10X faster than anything seen in 65 million years (when there was no such thing as permafrost, or even permanent polar ice caps). And there's no reason to believe that we can keep our warming to only +1.5C by 2100, given the latest IPCC report.

[SheilaT]

5. Thanks.

I should have been able to puzzle out the rate of warming aspect by myself but I didn't.

On a related matter, I wonder what happened as the permafrost came into being. See, I said I think about odd things all the time.

[Bigmack]

6. I'm a retired teacher and I LOVED

having kids like you in my classes! They were ALWAYS curious about EVERYTHING, and they asked cool questions that sometimes I had to do research on before I could "answer" them. NEVER stop wondering - questioning - being curious! WONDERFUL characteristics those! Oh, and you might like the book, The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert. Your local library probably has it, and for a serious, pretty scientific book, it's really quite readable.

[SheilaT]

7. I've read part of that book, had to return it to the library

because it's a 14 day new book and lots of others were lined up for it. I'll need to put it back on reserve for myself.

And thanks also for telling me I'm the kind of student you like. I am curious about everything. Last fall I did adult astronomy camp through the University of Arizona. One of the coolest things ever! Both of my sons had done the teen version back about fifteen or so years ago. Same astronomer still running the camp. Spent two nights up on Mt. Lemmon, got to operate a 61 inch telescope. Way cool.

[Bigmack]

8. I AM JEALOUS!!!!!

What a wonderful "camp" to be able to attend!

[SheilaT]

9. Here's a link

to information about it: http://www.astronomycamp.org/pages/adultcamp.html

I'd always been jealous that my kids got to go, and then at some point I learned about the adult camp, and it's taken me some years to be organized enough to go.

If there's any chance, that you or anyone else reading this can attend, do so. It's fabulous. I would like to attend again, and maybe I'll do it in a year or two.

Don McCarthy, the man running the camps is my age, and I asked him who would take over whenever he might retire. He indicated that the camps may well come to an end as he just doesn't have anyone in the pipeline to do so. What a shame. But Don is so incredibly good at it, that it's hard to imagine anyone replacing him. He devotes and enormous amount of time and effort to making sure the camps run well, including having his wife prepare some of the food for our meals. Plus, Don is an all-around great guy.