Research has found Arctic soil has warmed to the point where it releases more carbon in the winter than northern plants can absorb during the summer. “There’s a net loss,” said Dalhousie University’s Jocelyn Egan, one of 75 co-authors of a paper published in Nature Climate Change. Until now, little was known about winter emissions from permafrost and the soil above it. The results found carbon dioxide emissions of 1.7 billion tonnes a year are about twice as high as previous estimates. The net result is that Arctic soil around the globe is probably already releasing more than 600 million tonnes of CO2 annually.

Source: Huffington Post October 22, 2019 13:17 UTC