Thawing permafrost releases greenhouse gas from depth
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Which effects did the heat wave of summer 2020 have in Siberia? In a new study geologists from Bonn, Uppsala and St. Petersburg compared the spatial and temporal distribution of methane concentrations in the air of northern Siberia with geological maps. The result: the methane concentrations in the air after last year's heat wave indicate that increased gas emissions came from limestone formations.
"Assuming that a similar phenomenon to the Siberian heat wave will repeatedly happen again, these additional emissions from thawing bedrock may be much more dangerous than those included in the existing models accounting for microbial methane only," says Jaroslaw Majka, Associate Professor at the Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University.