Eternal permafrost, salted from ancient times, can accelerate changes in the Arctic as a result of global warming.

Ecologist Ben Jones has personal scores for her. In 2018, he, a polar explorer from the University of Alaska at Faerbanks, washed the frozen land near Utkagvik, the largest settlement on the northern slope of Alaska to extract Kern. At a depth of 5.5 meters, where the temperature is much lower than zero, the soil should be solid as a stone. Instead, Bur sharply entered the soft layer.

“I was jerking and I pulled my back. For about 10 hours I was dragged back to the Utkagvik on a sleigh, ”Jones recalls.

Having studied with difficulty a sample, the researchers found that the unexpected layer of salt melted the permafrost.

Jones and other scientists now believe that such a salted eternal permafrost acts as an accomplice of climate change, which heats the Arctic four times faster than the rest of the planet. Like salt scattered on city sidewalks, buried salt layers, apparently, accelerate thawing and, along with it, large-scale transformation of the landscape.

“It seems that now everything is a little faster than one could expect, based on the fact that the eternal permafrost melts at 0 ° C,” says the scientist.

Salt perzlota is not news

The researchers watched this buried salt a decade ago. Some described how, when drilling several meters deep into them, they opened a fountain of salt water at temperatures significantly lower than the freezing point. “In the coastal regions, we had water fountains above the ice level at −10 ° C,” shared Paul Overduin from the Alfred Vegener Institute, the Center for Polar and Marine Studies named after the Helmholtz. Back in 1960, borehoers near the city of Cocebu in Alaska reported that they were passing through many layers of salt, added Roger Kril from the University of Texas University A&M.

According to him, the explanation lies deep in the history of the Earth. During the last warm period between the glacial eras, 115,000 years ago and earlier, the polar ice shields melted, and the sea level rose by tens of meters. The current Arctic plains were flooded with salt water. Even after the ice shields began to grow again 110,000 years ago, the sea continued to advance on the Arctic shores, because the gravitational attraction of ice to the ocean more than compensated for the loss of water – these are these modeling data that Kril plans to present at a meeting of the American geophysical union in December.

When the ocean retreated, the vast spaces of salted sea deposits were open to frosty air and froze. Over time, they were covered with other deposits. This means that “anywhere within a few tens of meters from the modern sea level, there should be a layer of salted eternal permafrost quite close to the surface,” Kril explains. According to his estimates, only in Alaska from 1000 to 10,000 square kilometers can they rest on a salty base located at a depth of several meters to tens of meters under the surface.

As they warm up in the north, these ancient foundations begin to come to life. Jones witnessed one of the signs in 2021, when he and his colleagues found that a small lake near Utkagvik suddenly became half a meter deeper. The reason was a layer of salt, which melted, despite the temperatures below zero, they said in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The same process probably accelerates the growth of lakes throughout the Arctic.

On the other side of the ocean

On the other side of the Bering Strait, in Russia, buried salt can cause a sharp change in the landscape. Over the past decade, about 20 have formed on the remote Yamal and Gydan peninsulas mysterious craters ten meters wide and depth. Scientists attending newly formed craters discovered methane, but no signs of burning, which suggests that only the force of expanding gas broke through the ground. Eternal permafrost is rich in methane, enclosed in water molecules in the form of an ice “gas hydrate”. The question is, what made him break to the surface.

There are many theories, but the chemist from Oxford University Ana Mongado believes that salt plays a role. Together with her colleagues, she simulated how the pockets of salt water at a depth of tens of meters can contribute to cracking of overlying eternal permafrost and the release of gas – and shared the results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The scenario is as follows: as the upper layers of the soil warm up and thaw, melt water penetrates into the lens of salt water through Osmos. The added liquid makes the pocket expand, creating pressure, high enough to split eternal permafrost and release gas. “The methane accumulates until the soil can hold it back anymore,” says Morgado.

All in our hands

Jones and his colleagues organized the project “Melting below zero”, in which areas are applied to the map of the northern slope, dangerous because of salt under them. In the future, according to his project partner, he will be expanded to the rich permafrost regions around the world. But now it is clear that the frozen eternal permafrost “is much less powerful than you can expect based on temperature measurements”-obviously due to salt.

Be that as it may, underground salt is not subject to man. And the climate – it can still be.

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This article is republished from
naukatv.ru
on 2025-09-23 15:50:00.
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