Report: Scientists are shocked by Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years sooner than predicted

This The Guardian article discusses why scientists are shocked by Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years sooner than predicted.

  • Ice blocks frozen solid for thousands of years destabilized
  • ‘The climate is now warmer than at any time in last 5,000 years’.

Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.

A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia.

“What we saw was amazing,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters. “It’s an indication that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more years.“

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