- A melting permafrost peat bog stretching across an area
the size of France and Germany could unleash billions of tons of greenhouse
gas into the atmosphere, Russian scientists have warned.
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- The huge frozen region, covering around 360,000 square
miles of western Siberia, is rapidly turning into a watery landscape of
shallow lakes. Experts fear it could release huge quantities of methane
trapped in the frozen peat.
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- The latest alert follows research by Sergei Kirpotin,
a botanist from Tomsk State University in Russia, and Judith Marquand from
Oxford University.
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- Mr Kirpotin told New Scientist magazine that the entire
western Siberian sub-Arctic region had begun to melt in the last three
or four years. He predicted an "ecological landslide that is probably
irreversible and undoubtedly connected to climatic warming".
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- Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere
on the planet, with average temperatures increasing by about 3C in the
last 40 years.
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- The warming is believed to be due to a combination of
man-made climate change, a cyclical atmospheric phenomenon known as the
Arctic oscillation, and feedbacks caused by melting ice. As ice melts,
it exposes bare ground and sea surface that absorb more solar heat than
reflective white ice and snow.
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- Siberia's peat bogs formed around 11,000 years ago at
the end of the last ice age. Since then they have been generating methane,
most of which has been trapped in permafrost and deeper ice-like structures
called clathrates.
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- Dr Larry Smith, an expert at the University of California
at Los Angeles, has estimated that the west Siberian bog alone contains
some 70 billion ton of methane - a quarter of all the methane stored on
the land surface worldwide.
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- Scientists at the University of Alaska have found methane
"hot spots" in eastern Siberia where the gas is bubbling from
thawing permafrost so fast that it is preventing the surface from freezing,
even in mid-winter.
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- Catherine Pearce, a climate campaigner at Friends of
the Earth, said: "It's very worrying. The release of these emissions
is causing massive climate instability leading to extreme weather events,
rising temperatures, the melting of the Arctic ice sheet, rising sea levels,
droughts, heat waves and famine."
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
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- http://telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/0
8/11/wbog11.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/08/11/ixnewstop.html
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