Scientists did not know the extent of hazards posed by pollutants stored in permafrost “everything from microbes and potential viruses to nuclear waste, chemicals, and Mercury,” said lead study author, a science systems engineer with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab at the California Institute of Technology (JPL-Caltech).
This region has been getting warmer four times faster than the global average, weakening the top layer of Arctic permafrost. Melting Arctic permafrost in places like Alaska, Canada, and Siberia, where permafrost layers have long acted as a giant freezer locking in soil and potentially deadly organic matter.
“Permafrost is like the dirty cousin to the ice sheets,” said the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research director at the University of Colorado Boulder, “It’s a buried phenomenon.”
The northernmost reaches of the planet are home to about 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon, roughly 51 times the amount the world currently released in 2019, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Detonations by the Soviet Union in the country’s Novaya Zemlya archipelago between 1959 and 1991 released 265 megatons of nuclear energy.
Russians also scuttled more than 100 decommissioned nuclear submarines in the Barents and Kara seas, releasing radioactive plutonium and cesium that can be detected today in sea bottom sediments and ice sheets, and in plants and soil beneath glaciers, according to the study.
The U.S. Camp Century, a nuclear-powered research center in Greenland, generated radioactive waste abandoned beneath the ice when the site was decommissioned in 1967.
That ice is rapidly retreating, with losses of about 268 tons (243 metric tons) per year, as the Arctic warms.
And when a U.S. B-52 bomber crashed near Denmark’s Thule Air Base in Greenland in 1968, its nuclear missile payload ruptured and released Uranium and plutonium from four bombs into the ice sheet. Arctic radiation levels could remain harmful until 2500, the study authors reported.
Decades of mining in the Arctic across tens of thousands of square miles also left waste rich in toxic heavy metals such as mercury, arsenic, and nickel.
These pollutants have since sunk deep into Arctic soil and could threaten wildlife and human communities in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia and Russia, according to the study. An estimated 880,000 tons (800,000 metric tons) of mercury alone is stored in permafrost.
Arctic permafrost also traps reservoirs of hazardous chemicals that were banned in the early 2000s, such as the insecticide DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), a group of chemicals that were widely used in coolant fluids.
These and other persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, traveled to the Arctic atmospherically and, over time, became concentrated in permafrost. However, “few studies have traced POP transport and risk,” suggesting that “the impact of these chemicals within Arctic systems is underestimated,” according to the study.
Microbial threats could lurk in Arctic permafrost, too. Because Arctic microbes have evolved to survive subzero temperatures with minimal access to nutrients or water, many can come back to life even after thousands of years in a deep freeze.
In prior studies, scientists reported that other researchers revived bacterial populations in permafrost dating to 30,000, 120,000, and even a million years ago.
It’s humans that are destroying the earth.
Revelations 11:18 And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.
Matthew 24:37 But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
Matthew 24:38 For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark,
Matthew 24:39 And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
Luke 21:11 And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and diseases; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.
Luke 21:25 And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring;
Luke 21:28 And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.
Read more at: Melting Permafrost in the Arctic will awaken sleeping viruses (transformedbythetruth.com)
Read more at: The Deadly Diseases Being Released as Ice Thaws (transformedbythetruth.com)
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Read more at: World’s scientists say disastrous climate change is here (transformedbythetruth.com)
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