The threatening thaw: climate professor on heatwave risks to tipping point of permafrost — SkimNews
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- Permafrost stores 1,500 gigatons of carbon — three times more than all living vegetation on Earth — across 20 million sq km in Siberia, Canada, Alaska, and parts of Europe.
- Hugelius explains that thaw creates thermokarsts (lakes, wetlands, gullies) that fundamentally change the landscape and keep emitting carbon for decades to centuries once the threshold is passed.
- Even if emissions stopped today, southern permafrost is already doomed — warming thresholds were crossed a decade or more ago and several million sq km (notably in northern Sweden and Finland) will disappear regardless.
- At 1.8–3.6°C warming by century's end, permafrost is projected to release 200–300 gigatons of CO2 equivalents — several times the EU's current annual emissions, approaching today's US or China totals in worse scenarios.
- Russia faces the steepest economic hit because half its oil and gas sits on permafrost that "won't be working well in a couple of decades," according to Hugelius.
- Arctic warming runs up to four times the global mean, accelerating thaw; for every degree of warming limited, 4 million sq km of permafrost is saved.
- Methane released from wet thawed landscapes is roughly 30 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, though it breaks down within 10–15 years.
Why it matters: Russia faces structural disruption: half its oil and gas infrastructure sits on permafrost that "won't be working well in a couple of decades." Carbon budgets must now price in releases already locked in — southern permafrost is doomed regardless of future emissions — while the Arctic's 4x warming multiplier compounds the timeline Hugelius says is already accelerating.
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