AN ARTICLE HEADLINED "Ice Turning to Mush in Alaska" on the WebCenter 11 news website warns that evidence of permafrost melting is becoming widespread in Alaska's interior. Fairbanks and other centres of human activity are already riddled with sinkholes and subsidence, but experts now warn that local areas of permafrost meltdown are spreading into the wilderness and that the point at which it all starts to thaw is fast approaching.
Vladimir Romanovksy, a Russian-born geophysicist at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, says that at the moment the permafrost is still stable, but is within a degree or two of the point at which thawing will occur, when "we will be able to say we are the warmest we have been the last 100,000 years."
It is feared that widespread melting of permafrost would cause a sudden release of yet more "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere, further hastening the global warming phenomena -- of which this summer's catastrophic hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico are stark evidence. It's starting to look as though life in the Far North -- and perhaps elsewhere -- is on point of changing radically.
Posted by jjeffrey at September 23, 2005 05:30 PM