- Melting permafrost an environmental hazard
The permafrost of the Arctic areas in Russia, Canada and Alaska is melting. This causes emissions of enormous amounts of greenhouse gases which in turn will speed up the global greenhouse effect.
In the course of the next 100 years, a permafrost area at the size of Australia will melt and emit around 1700 billion tons of greenhouse gases. This is more than twice the amount which the atmosphere contains today. It is the American scientist Edward Schuur who has made the estimates, Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten reports.
One of the gases which the soil emits after the permafrost has melted is methane, a gas which is far stronger than CO2. According to Arild Skedsmo in WWF Norway, permafrost melting is a far bigger environmental problem than people know, and will escalate the speed of the climate changes.
Through ages there have been established thick layers of frozen organic material in the Arctic region which we call permafrost. It is when temperature in these areas rise, that the stored methane and CO2 is released to the atmosphere.
Professor Bjørn Kvamme at the University of Bergen believes on the contrary that there are large potentials in exploitation of these gases. In his opinion this is high quality nature gases which the world needs. He therefore challenges other scientist to do more research on technologies which will make it possible to extract these gases from the soil, before the warm climate melts the permafrost.
In Russia they have been extracting nature gas from permafrost for several decades, and there is also a research project in Canada working on these issues.
