Some basic information on permafrost.

The permafrost region. Is about 22% of the exposed land area in the Northern Hemisphere.

In the High Arctic (above 66°N) the permafrost zone consists of the Boreal Forests and the ground permafrost. The permafrost area of the Tibetan Plateau (the 3rd pole) is not wooded.

There is NO Permafrost older than about 750,000 years in the NH. It wasn’t until just 800,000ya that the Earth cooled down enough for PERMANENT Permafrost Zones to form.

750,000 years of Organic Carbon have ACCUMULATED in the Permafrost Zone. In fact, the “Boreal Zone” has functioned as a carbon sink for so long that if you burned all of the oil available in all the reserves around the world, you would still release less carbon than the boreal forest and permafrost is currently holding.

The organic matter once trapped on ice suppresses an estimated amount of organic carbon around 1,672 gigatonnes. Which is equivalent to all of the organic carbon contained in ALL of the land plants on the WHOLE planet PLUS what’s in the atmosphere at this moment.

A gigatonne is 1,000,000,000 tonnes, and is often used when discussing human carbon dioxide emissions. This is roughly the mass of all land mammals (other than humans) in the world. It’s also roughly 2X the mass of all of the people in the world.

THERE IS ENOUGH ORGANIC CARBON IN THE PERMAFROST TO INCREASE THE ATMOSPHERIC CO2 LEVEL TO ABOUT 1300PPM, not counting the CO2 released by the burning of the Boreal Forests.

Half of this frozen organic matter is found in the first 3 meters of the permafrost and the remaining is in deposits that extend up to 30 meters deep.

Yedoma permafrost in North East Siberia is rich in organic carbon, being responsible for one-third of the total organic carbon on Earth (Altshuler, Goordial, & Whyte, 2017). It is the FASTEST warming area of the planet, having warmed +7°C since 1979.

The Yedoma permafrost deposits ALONE could raise atmospheric CO2 levels by around +400ppm. Again, that’s ON TOP OF the CO2 that the BURNING of the Northern Boreal Forests is going to add to the atmosphere.

We worry about the Amazon and forests in Indonesia, but the Boreal Forests hold more Carbon than all the other forests in the world combined.

As the Earth’s largest above-ground “pool” of carbon, forests play a critical role in regulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Spanning 1.3 billion acres, the Boreal Forest is the Earth’s largest terrestrial carbon storehouse, storing around 700–800 billion tons of carbon.

The main tree species, depending on the length of the growing season and summer temperatures, varies across the world. The taiga of North America is mostly spruce, Scandinavian and Finnish taiga consists of a mix of spruce, pines and birch, Russian taiga has spruces, pines and larches depending on the region, while the Eastern Siberian taiga is a vast larch forest.

The tree species that dominate Canada’s vast boreal forest, are black spruce and poplar. While the Canadian boreal forest is VAST (2.7 million sq km) unfortunately it is not a “diverse” forest.

While the trees are well equipped to withstand the harsh northern winters. The same traits that give them an advantage in the cold make them poor candidates to survive in a warming world.

These findings are painting a picture quite different than the long-held assumption that climate change would benefit the northern forests. They suggest a “double whammy” effect in which the burning forests ADD CO2 to the atmosphere and then REMOVE less CO2 from the atmosphere because they are dying.

As more southern tree species, like maple, are predicted to migrate northwards, they will find the harsh environment, low light conditions, and thin soils of the boreal forest hostile to their presence. This means that the void left behind by retreating boreal species will not be easily replaced in a warmer world.