Permafrost and Climate Change: 4.5 Million Euros for new Project
1 October 2013, by Ute Kreis
How will the warming of the Arctic affect the Siberian permafrost? And how much carbon dioxide and methane will be released when the ground thaws? Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is sponsoring the new Russian-German joint project “CarboPerm – Carbon in Permafrost: Generation, Transformation and Release,” providing a total of 4.5 million Euros over the next three years.
How will the warming of the Arctic affect the Siberian permafrost? And how much carbon dioxide and methane will be released when the ground thaws? Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is sponsoring the new Russian-German joint project “CarboPerm – Carbon in Permafrost: Generation, Transformation and Release,” providing a total of 4.5 million Euros over the next three years. Roughly 1 million Euros of that funding will go to the University of Hamburg.
“The new project will support a comprehensive approach, which has never been used before for the Siberian region,” explains the speaker of the new project, Prof. Eva-Maria Pfeiffer from the University of Hamburg’s KlimaCampus. “Here, our focus is on the equally complex and delicate ecosystem of the Arctic. Glaciology, marine and atmospheric research, biology, soil science and biogeochemistry – all these disciplines are working hand in hand to deliver new insights. Furthermore, we are now working very closely with our Russian colleagues. Thanks to this cooperation, we have been able to improve our analyses and can more accurately predict how permafrost landscapes will respond to climate change.” These efforts studies also incorporate detailed reconstructions of the carbon cycle under various climatic conditions of the past. The research team then combines this historic knowledge with the latest research findings, producing climate models to simulate future developments.
These efforts are being carried out together with Russian scientists as part of Germany’s Wissenschaftlich Technische Zusammenarbeit (WTZ) program. Researchers at the University of Hamburg’s Institute of Soil Science are coordinating the project. Further German partners include the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research; the Universities of Cologne and Potsdam; the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - German Research Centre for Geosciences; the Max Planck Institutes for Biogeochemistry in Jena and for Meteorology in Hamburg; the TU Bergakademie Freiberg; and the Leibniz Institute for Applied Geophysics.
Roughly a quarter of the land mass in the Northern Hemisphere is permanently frozen. These permafrost-covered regions have become enormous carbon reservoirs over thousands of years and hold an estimated 1,700 gigatons of carbon. To put that in perspective: The whole of our planet’s current vegetation stores roughly 700 gigatons. The massive accumulation in the Siberian regions was only possible because the constantly low temperatures have prevented any of the carbon trapped in the plant matter from breaking down. But as a result of climate change, temperatures are rising twice as rapidly in polar regions in comparison to the middle latitudesglobal mean. As the permafrost begins to thaw, microbes that have remained dormant will start breaking down the carbon into greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane. Once these gases start finding their way into the atmosphere, what was once a carbon reservoir will instead become a carbon source. According to Pfeiffer, “It remains unclear whether or not areas of the arctic tundra have already become new sources of carbon. One of the goals of our project is to answer that question.”