Trying to find good news in the Arctic
Weighing the carbon implications of worsening wildfires, permafrost thaw, and now, expanding peatlands.
In early 2015, I visited the small Iñupiat village of Kivalina in Alaska along the Chukchi Sea, where declining sea ice, erosion, and strong waves had led to increasing calls for relocating an entire community (a process that has since begun). It was the beginning of a period in which traveling to the Arctic, or just below it, became synonymous for me with doing major stories: About a Greenland ice shelf, a ship traveling through the Northwest Passage, a lake bubbling methane gas.
The journalistic lure is hard to resist, because Arctic climate change is dramatic. You have hillsides collapsing, multi-billion ton ice crackups, glacial tsunamis, apparent sudden explosions in the ground, and a lot else. It’s a place to capture climate change’s version of the sublime. The awe inspiring, even the dangerous.
But a few Arctic changes loom larger than others, because they have the potential to affect the whole globe:
Accelerating Greenland ice losses could remake coastlines, and also potentially contribute to a slowing or shutdown of Atlantic ocean circulation.
A loss of Arctic summer sea ice would amplify global warming itself, as open waters take up much more solar heat at a time when the Arctic sun is at its peak. We’re not there yet, but the risk is growing. Here’s where the ice currently stands, in a year in which a new record low winter maximum has already been recorded:
And finally, there’s the permafrost feedback, in which the frozen northern ground, rich with dead plant remains that never decomposed due to the cold temperatures, thaws and begins emitting greenhouse gases. This could amplify the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, even as the world is trying to cut it. It may have already begun.
Because these changes are potentially so serious, I think it’s important to closely monitor what science has to say about them, both the bad news and the good. The positive and the negative surprises. If there’s good news, we particularly need to hear it. Too often, people get a sense that all the climate news is disaster, disaster, disaster, whereas in fact, new research often uncovers complexities and mitigating factors.
A few weeks back, scrolling through scientific journals, I came across a striking example of this. It was a study on the phenomenon of Arctic peatland expansion, in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. The research hasn’t gotten much attention, so I thought it would be worth, well, unearthing.
If widespread, the expansion of northern peatlands could help to mitigate, at least to an extent, the losses of permafrost carbon that are expected to occur. But the deeper I got into this topic, the more I learned about the caveats, too. The observations are limited, and the landscapes are complex in multiple dimensions. Plus, two permafrost experts told me they’re not sure how much this really assuages their concerns, and even a study author cautioned that there are downsides here, as well as positives. So this is hardly some sort of salvation that you can bank on.
Still, I would put it in the category of positive climate news overall, and it’s certainly intriguing enough to inspire us to get wonky about peatlands (which I like to do anyway!). These are wetlands in which dead plant material gets stored underwater, and so the carbon in it is preserved, and builds, with the bottom peat layers potentially containing carbon that’s hundreds of years old or more.
Much like forests, peatlands are utterly crucial to the storage of carbon in land surfaces (instead of in the atmosphere). They’re found in many parts of the world, and tropical ones are threatened in many areas by agricultural interests. But the world’s northern peatlands are also immense, estimated at over 1 million square miles in area.
In many cases, frozen permafrost and peatland may go hand in hand. The icy ground below or near the peatland prevents water from draining, keeping things wet. “Some peatlands are in the permafrost zone, and some of the permafrost zone is peatland,” explains Katherine Crichton, a University of Exeter researcher who led the new work.
Northern peatlands hold some 400 billion tons of carbon, according to the new study (which the paper adds is around half of what’s stored in all the world’s forests). The soil of the permafrost region as a whole is estimated to contain vastly more, some 1,400 to 1,600 billion tons. As for permafrost peatlands (the area of overlap) they probably hold a little under 200 billion tons of carbon, so a fraction of the overall total.
If the carbon enumerated in the prior paragraph starts escaping to the atmosphere in significant amounts, we’re in big trouble. But at least there are some offsetting factors. A trend of “Arctic greening” has also been underway, with warming and more atmospheric carbon dioxide stoking additional plant growth. This has often taken the form of tundra “shrubification,” or the growth of woody plants. These stow away some carbon; but if the greening extends to peatlands, it could be a much bigger deal.
The new research — by a team of 13 researchers from the University of Exeter and several other institutions in Ireland, Canada, and Finland — finds just this. It’s the product of some serious fieldwork. Researchers visited remote peatlands in Canada, Finland, and Svalbard. In some cases the locations didn’t have names, so the scientists provided some: “Angela’s Paradise,” “Glacial Nirvana.”
The researchers drew transects on the ground from each peatland center to its edge. With this spatial information, they could then use satellite imagery to examine how the greenery had changed over time, with increasing plant life at the peatland edge suggesting expansion. For high Arctic locations, here’s what they found:
These are only nine locations in the high Arctic, two of which were measured along two separate transects (there were also several low Arctic sites in the study that are not shown here). So the researchers really can’t generalize too widely. Nor does the current study does contain much data on the carbon levels in the peaty ground itself, although it does provide a bit of evidence to suggest that these are also increasing.
“This is an important carbon sink which might help us with future emissions,” said Crichton. “We don’t have an estimate of the actual size or potential of it yet.”
The permafrost carbon threat
Ted Schuur, a permafrost expert at Northern Arizona University who was not involved in the new research, told me it appeared to be well done, and suggests peatlands are indeed expanding. But Schuur noted that if peatlands are growing directly into permafrost, and getting it wet, we might expect more methane gas emissions to result, which would also contribute to warming, making the verdict more mixed.
Schuur is also concerned that whatever greening plants may do, in peatlands or elsewhere, it won’t be enough to counteract the permafrost feedback process. The problem is, that process — driven by microbial organisms getting more active in warmer temperatures, and starting to feast within the Arctic’s graveyard of frozen plant mass — is just so simple and inexorable. “If you have to think about soil release of carbon, and plant uptake, I often wonder if the plants can keep up,” Schuur said.
“I think the feedback is already happening,” he added.
Sue Natali, a permafrost expert at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, agreed.
“There have been observations of greening across many northern ecosystems for decades, and observations and models show that plan[t] productivity does increase with warming,” Natali said in an email. “However, when disturbances, abrupt thaw, fire, etc are factored in, the story changes.”
Wildfires are key here: They can tear through forests that sit atop permafrost, exposing the ground to sunnier conditions and hastening the thaw of what’s beneath. A number of this year’s Canadian wildfires were likely burning in permafrost regions, for instance. Peatlands would have a lot of work to do to counter all of this.
Crichton’s team does not quantify, in the current paper, the extent to which peatlands might be able to offset permafrost carbon losses. They can only speak in general terms.
“The potential is, in these high Arctic places, that the peatlands can expand,” Crichton said. “So we can potentially have an increased carbon sink in the higher latitudes, which might be able to counteract, and we don’t know the extent at all, some of the carbon lost in the lower latitudes.”
And study co-author Angela Gallego-Sala told me there are downsides, too, in a world of dramatic Arctic greening and peatland expansion. True, more carbon would be stored. But the turnover of ecosystems could have big consequences for native species, and also for northern Inuit communities. “We would be forcing these populations out of their cultural traditions,” Gallego-Sala wrote in an email.
In sum, a study that upon first glance appeared to offer positive news, ends up presenting a much more complex story upon deeper examination. Not for the first time in my experience. I think it’s my job at times to tell the nuanced or ambiguous stories, the ones where if you want more clarity, you’re just going to have to sit and wait. That’s how science works, which means that science writing, too, needs to reflect that.
Updated charts — June global temperature, newspaper jobs
The Copernicus Climate Change Service came out last week with its June reading on global temperatures. Remember, this dataset runs hotter than many of the others. That makes it notable that June came in at 1.3 degrees C above preindustrial levels. Yes, it’s the third hottest June on record in this dataset, but it moves us more clearly out of 1.5°C territory…for now.
I also updated my running chart tracking U.S. newspaper jobs. This year is interesting because there’s a slight decline, but it is small so far compared with many prior years.
It’s hard to digest this without weighing what Donald Trump means for news. News outlets saw a famous “Trump bump” in his first administration. Yet despite all the web traffic and subscriptions, newspaper jobs declined substantially from 2017-2020.
Now, an enormous volume of news is once again being generated. But at best, jobs are flat to slightly down. Clearly, the volume of news is not the only thing that sustains a healthy newspaper business. (Indeed, the recent Reuters Institute Digital News Report has found that the “Trump bump” this time around has skipped traditional news media sources, and instead favored creators and influencers.)
I’ll keep watching these data.
In praise of editors
This post is long, and in part, that’s probably because I have no editor! I’m painfully aware of that and in fact last week I posted this, as a kind of experiment with the Substack notes feature. I’m reposting it here, for subscribers who may not have seen it: