Significant implications of permafrost thawing for climate change control

Vulnerability of Permafrost Carbon to Climate Change: Implications for the Global Carbon Cycle

H alter the global cycle of carbon (C) by burning fossil fuels and modifying the land surface. The addition of billions of tons of C greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is changing its heat-trapping capacity, which, in turn, is changing Earth’s climate (IPCC 2007). Although much of the modern increase in the atmospheric C pool results from human activities, the future trajectory of the atmospher...

Stability Results for Convection in Thawing Subsea Permafrost

Penetrative convection is investigated in a porous medium bounded above by the ocean bed and below by the interface of the thawing permafrost ground. Such convection ow is observed oo the coast of Alaska. The physical model for the thawing subsea permafrost is that of Harrison and Swift 8], with the eld variables: the brine velocity, the temperature and the salinity. We simplify the problem by ...

Implications of Climate Change for Alaska’s Seabirds

Seabirds are prominent and highly visible components of marine ecosystems that will be affected by global climate change. The Bering Sea region is particularly important to seabirds; populations there are larger and more diverse than in any similar region in North America—over 90% of seabirds breeding in the continental United States are found in this region. Seabirds, so named because they spe...

Climate Change: Implications for Food Safety

Climate Change: Overview and Implications for Wildlife

The Earth’s climate is vastly different now from what it was 100 million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the planet and tropical plants thrived closer to the poles. It is different from what it was only 20,000 years ago when ice sheets covered much of the Northern Hemisphere. Although the Earth’s climate will surely continue to change, climatic changes in the distant past were driven by natural...