This is a very important story that I feel the whole world should know about right now!
I will leave this story to talk for itself.
Quote:
“ …”It scares me,” said Kumari Karunaratne, a permafrost expert who works for the Northwest Territories Geological Survey. “This methane that’s being released is being released over huge areas across the north. And it’s continually seeping out.
Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. So, as climate change speeds up the permafrost melt, the permafrost melt will exacerbate climate change. By exactly how much, it’s impossible to say. Karunaratne won’t even try to guess, because measuring it is difficult and imprecise. The area where it’s happening is vast and much of it remains uninhabited and unexplored. But there are dramatic examples that show just how much methane is bubbling up from underground. Some lakes in the Arctic are so full of it, if you punch a hole in the ice you can light the escaping gas on fire. YouTube has videos of researchers and others doing it in Alaska and Siberia. But the same thing is happening in the Northwest Territories.
There are other problems, too.
Last summer in Siberia, the unusually intense summer heat melted the permafrost, exposing a reindeer carcass that had been embedded in it. That carcass was infected with anthrax, a deadly bacteria that had been locked in the ice. A 12-year-old boy died after being infected and at least eight others were sickened. It opens up the possibility that other dangers could be unleashed. Siberian researchers say a gravesite in one town contains bodies of people who died of smallpox in the 1890s. They were buried in the soil just above the permafrost, which is now melting. That’s raising fears that smallpox, which was eradicated globally in 1977, could make a comeback. A woman stands with reindeer in the Yamal-Nenets region of Siberia, Russia, where a 12-year-old boy died and 20 people were infected in 2016 after an anthrax outbreak. An unusually intense summer had melted the permafrost, exposing a reindeer carcass containing anthrax.
Sergey Netesov, chief of the virology laboratory at Novosibirsk State University, told the Siberian Times newspaper that there are thousands of graves in the region — some human, some cattle. The recent anthrax outbreak, he said, is “reason enough to finance research into the diagnostics and prevention of exceptionally dangerous infections.” Whether that happens or not, people in the Northwest Territories know they have no power to stop climate change. Global temperatures are already at record levels and the polar regions are feeling the effects more dramatically than anywhere else. “There are really remarkable changes that are happening in a short amount of time,” said Karunaratne.
And there’s likely more to come.”…”