For thousands of years, the Arctic has been the planet’s great storehouse of CO2. That just changed

For decades (centuries or even millennia) the Arctic has been a “natural carbon sink.” According to the latest estimates, permafrost alone stores up to four times more carbon dioxide than everything humans have emitted in modern times. The tundra has been a key piece of the planet’s climate balance.

Now the situation has changed.

Has it changed? That concludes the “Arctic Report Card 2024”, the reference report on Arctic climate changes prepared by NOAA (United States Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency). In it, after noting that the region’s annual air temperatures this year reached the second highest level since 1900, they detail that we have crossed an unprecedented turning point.

For the first time on record, the Arctic tundra “is emitting more carbon than it stores,” explained NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad at the presentation of the report.

The changes go further, of course: In addition to high temperatures and forest fires, the decline in large herds of caribou and increased rainfall are radically changing the landscape of the bioregion.

As if that were not enough, according to data collected by 97 scientists from 11 countries, the local and regional variability of these changes is highly unpredictable. This is causing animals, plants and humans to go completely crazy: that is, a cascading degradation that is very difficult to solve.

The Arctic begins to release carbon. According to NOAA, since 2003 circumpolar fires have emitted an average of 207 million tons of carbon per year. To that, we must add the almost 400 million tons of carbon emitted by the Canadian fires in 2023.

This cannot be dissociated from the idea that “the last nine years were the warmest ever recorded in the Arctic” and that “last summer turned out to be the wettest.”

What can we expect? That is one of the big questions on the table: for years, the Arctic region has been a latent threat in the context of climate change. Now it is no longer latent: in the coming years we will see if all those models that warned us about the dangers of thawing the north were right.

And we are going to see it in the worst possible way.

Image | Annie Spartt/Climate.gov

In WorldOfSoftware | Why permafrost could be the great threat of climate change in the coming years