As the permafrost melts in the north, forests no longer grow straight.
Sarah James, an Alaska Native elder, says global warming is radically changing her homeland. Even the forests no longer grow straight. Melting ground has caused trees to tilt or fall.
"Because permafrost melts, it causes a lot of erosion," says James, who lives in Arctic Village, a small Native American village in northeastern Alaska. "A lot of trees can't stand up straight. If the erosion gets worse, everything goes with it."
Permafrost is permanently frozen ground. But climate change has caused much of that ground to melt at an unprecedented rate. The ground buckles and sinks, causing trees to list at extreme angles.
Sometimes the trees survive the stress and continue growing, uprighting themselves to vertical. Other times they collapse or drown from rising water tables as subterranean ice melts. Because such trees seem to stagger across the landscape, people often call them "drunken trees."
Although trees can lean or curve for a number of reasons, including disturbance of soil caused by man-made excavations or landslides, the melting permafrost is making leaning trees more prevalent.
It's not just trees. Slumping land caused by melting permafrost also cracks pavement, breaks pipelines, and opens holes, causing expensive damage to houses and roads. "We have whole families who have had to move because their houses are not safe anymore," says James.
Wildlife has been affected by the shifting landscape as well. James has seen declines in spawning fish, nesting birds, and small mammals. Some climate models have predicted that most permafrost could melt by the end of the century. Jorgenson thinks it will take longer, since soil layers above the frozen ground are good insulators. But the area north of Fairbanks is predicted to warm by four to six degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

As the permafrost melts in the north, forests no longer grow straight.
Sarah James, an Alaska Native elder, says global warming is radically changing her homeland. Even the forests no longer grow straight. Melting ground has caused trees to tilt or fall.
"Because permafrost melts, it causes a lot of erosion," says James, who lives in Arctic Village, a small Native American village in northeastern Alaska. "A lot of trees can't stand up straight. If the erosion gets worse, everything goes with it."
Permafrost is permanently frozen ground. But climate change has caused much of that ground to melt at an unprecedented rate. The ground buckles and sinks, causing trees to list at extreme angles.
Sometimes the trees survive the stress and continue growing, uprighting themselves to vertical. Other times they collapse or drown from rising water tables as subterranean ice melts. Because such trees seem to stagger across the landscape, people often call them "drunken trees."
Although trees can lean or curve for a number of reasons, including disturbance of soil caused by man-made excavations or landslides, the melting permafrost is making leaning trees more prevalent.
It's not just trees. Slumping land caused by melting permafrost also cracks pavement, breaks pipelines, and opens holes, causing expensive damage to houses and roads. "We have whole families who have had to move because their houses are not safe anymore," says James.
Wildlife has been affected by the shifting landscape as well. James has seen declines in spawning fish, nesting birds, and small mammals. Some climate models have predicted that most permafrost could melt by the end of the century. Jorgenson thinks it will take longer, since soil layers above the frozen ground are good insulators. But the area north of Fairbanks is predicted to warm by four to six degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

I sort of stumbled across this article while searching for something else. For all you Chicken Littles who insist that "the sky is falling and the earth is warming!"; one of your favorite sources for your doomsaying, NASA, is apparently throwing you under the bus. I wonder how many of the "97%" of all RESPONSIBLE scientists are employed by NASA? [For that matter, I have never seen ANY documentation of ANY 97% of scientists who agree with this premise].

Tags: Science | US | climate | oceans | warming
NASA Scientists Puzzled by Global Cooling on Land and Sea
Image: NASA Scientists Puzzled by Global Cooling on Land and Sea (iStock)
Monday, 06 Oct 2014 12:36 PM


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The deep ocean may not be hiding heat after all, raising new questions about why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years, said the US space agency Monday.

Scientists have noticed that while greenhouse gases have continued to mount in the first part of the 21st century, global average surface air temperatures have stopped rising along with them, said NASA.

Some studies have suggested that heat is being absorbed temporarily by the deep seas, and that this so-called global warming hiatus is a temporary trend.

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But latest data from satellite and direct ocean temperature measurements from 2005 to 2013 "found the ocean abyss below 1.24 miles (1,995 meters) has not warmed measurably," NASA said in a statement.

The findings present a new puzzle to scientists, but co-author Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said the reality of climate change is not being thrown into doubt.

"The sea level is still rising," said Willis.

"We're just trying to understand the nitty-gritty details."

A separate study in August in the journal Science said the apparent slowdown in the Earth's surface warming in the last 15 years could be due to that heat being trapped in the deep Atlantic and Southern Ocean.

But the NASA researchers said their approach, described in the journal Nature Climate Change, is the first to test the idea using satellite observations, as well as direct temperature measurements of the upper ocean.

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"The deep parts of the ocean are harder to measure," said researcher William Llovel of NASA JPL.

"The combination of satellite and direct temperature data gives us a glimpse of how much sea level rise is due to deep warming. The answer is -- not much."