Permafrost science heats up in the United States

Programme will examine effect of Arctic warming on frozen soils.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is embarking on a US$100-million research programme to investigate what will happen to the 1,500 billion tonnes of organic carbon locked up in frozen soils of the far northern permafrost when they thaw in the rapidly warming Arctic climate.

The programme, called the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments — Arctic (NGEE), is designed to develop a fine-scale model that can simulate how soil microbes, plants and groundwater interact on the scale of centimetres to tens of metres, to control the amount of organic carbon stored underground in the permafrost zone. That model will be incorporated into the planetary-scale Earth-system models used to forecast how climate evolves under different emissions scenarios.

“Our ability to model greenhouse gases and vegetation dynamics is inadequate in today’s environment, and when we think out 50 to 100 years, that entire landscape is going to evolve and be much more complex,” says Stan Wullschleger, the principal investigator for NGEE and a plant ecologist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Read More