Rapid Permafrost Collapse Is Underway

I copy an article from Nature Geoscience below which has some really bad news on climate change.

Rapid Permafrost Collapse Is Underway, Disintegrating Landscapes And Our Predictions

MARLOWE HOOD, AFP

5 FEB 2020

Permafrost in Canada, Alaska and Siberia is abruptly crumbling in ways that could release large stores of greenhouse gases more quickly than anticipated, researchers have warned.

Scientists have long fretted that climate change - which has heated Arctic and subarctic regions at double the global rate - will release planet-warming CO2 and methane that has remained safely locked inside Earth's frozen landscapes for millennia.

It was assumed this process would be gradual, leaving humanity time to draw down carbon emissions enough to prevent permafrost thaw from tipping into a self-perpetuating vicious circle of ice melt and global warming.

But a study published on Monday in Nature Geoscience says projections of how much carbon would be released by this kind of slow-and-steady thawing overlook a less well-known process whereby certain types of icy terrain disintegrate suddenly - sometimes within days.

"Although abrupt permafrost thawing will occur in less than 20 percent of frozen land, it increases permafrost carbon release projections by about 50 percent," said lead author Merritt Turetsky, head of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research in Boulder, Colorado.

"Under all future warming scenarios, abrupt thaw leads to net carbon losses into the atmosphere," she told AFP.

Permafrost contains rocks, soil, sand and pockets of pure ground ice. Its rich carbon content is the remains of life that once flourished in the Arctic, including plants, animals and microbes.

This matter - which never fully decomposed - has been frozen for thousands of years.

It stretches across an area nearly as big as Canada and the United States combined, and holds about 1,500 billion tonnes or carbon - twice as much as in the atmosphere and three times the amount humanity has emitted since the start of industrialisation.

Some of this once rock-solid ground has begun to soften, upending indigenous communities and threatening industrial infrastructure across the sub-Arctic region, especially in Russia.

The evidence is mixed as to whether this not-so-permanent permafrost has started to vent significant quantities of methane or CO2.

Projections are also uncertain, with some scientists saying future emissions may be at least partially offset by new vegetation, which absorbs and stores CO2.

But there is no doubt, experts say, that permafrost will continue to give way as temperatures climb.

'Fast and dramatic'

In a special report published in September, the UN's scientific advisory body for climate change, the IPCC, looked at two scenarios.

If humanity manages - against all odds - to cap global warming at under 2°C, the cornerstone goal of the 2015 Paris climate treaty, "permafrost area shows a decrease of 24 percent by 2100", it concluded.

At the other extreme, if fossil fuel emissions continue to grow over the next 50 years - arguably an equally unlikely prospect - up to 70 percent of permafrost could disappear, the IPPC said.

But both scenarios assume the loss will be gradual, and that may be a mistake, Turetsky suggested.

"We estimate that abrupt permafrost thawing - in lowland lakes and wetlands, together with that in upland hills - could release 60 to 100 billion tonnes of carbon by 2300," she and colleagues noted in a 2019 comment also published by Nature.

One ton of carbon is equivalent to 3.67 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), which means this would be equivalent to about eight years of global emissions at current rates.

"This is in addition to the 200 billion tonnes of carbon expected to be released in other regions that will thaw gradually," she said.

Current climate models do not account for the possibility of rapid permafrost collapse and the amount of gases it might release, the study notes.

Abrupt thawing is "fast and dramatic", Merritt said, adding: "Forests can become lakes in the course of a month, landslides can occur with no warning, and invisible methane seep holes can swallow snowmobiles whole."

© Agence France-Presse

Quantum Entanglement and Worm Holes

I have always been fascinated by quantum entanglement. It bothered Einstein so much that he called it "Spooky action at a distance." and wrote a paper that started a continuing discussion between him and Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Here is a paragraph from Wikipedia describing this phenomenon

"Quantum entanglement is a label for the observed physical phenomenon that occurs when a pair or group of particles is generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in a way such that the quantum state of each particle of the pair or group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance. The topic of quantum entanglement is at the heart of the disparity between classical and quantum physics."  

The phenomenon shows that when a lab measurement is performed such as determining the "spin" of an entangled particle, the spin of the other entangled particle immediately changes to the opposite state no matter how far away it is. Einstein claimed that there must be local properties of the particle that cause this, since nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Bohr claimed that it was due to a collapse of the wave state of the particles that occurs when the lab observation is performed. But this was still controversial until the 1950's, when the Irish physicist, John Bell, established that you could determine experimentally that entanglement is not due to local properties. Some people even say that Bell's paper was the most important discovery in modern physics. Entanglement has been shown to occur between photons, electrons, buckyballs (which are large objects) and even a diamond.  But what exactly is this phenomenon is unknown and still mysterious. To me this has in fact always been the most mysterious thing in nature. 

An interesting far out idea is that time is an emergent phenomenon that occurs because of the nature of entanglement, and there is actually some experimental evidence for this. 

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I have always been fascinated by quantum entanglement. It bothered Einstein so much that he called it "Spooky action at a distance." and wrote a paper that started a continuing discussion between him and Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. 

The phenomenon shows that when a lab measurement is performed such as determining the "spin" of an entangled particle, the spin of the other entangled particle immediately changes to the opposite state no matter how far away it is. Einstein claimed that there must be local properties of the particle that cause this, since nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Bohr claimed that it was due to a collapse of the wave state of the particles that occurs when the lab observation is performed. But this was still controversial until the 1950's, when the Irish physicist, John Bell, established that you could determine experimentally that entanglement is not due to local properties. Some people even say that Bell's paper was the most important discovery in modern physics. Entanglement has been shown to occur between photons, electrons, buckyballs (which are large objects) and even a diamond.  But what exactly is this phenomenon is unknown and still mysterious. To me this has in fact always been the most mysterious thing in nature. 

An interesting far out idea is that time is an emergent phenomenon that occurs because of the nature of entanglement, and there is actually some experimental evidence for this. 

So what is a worm-hole? An Einstein–Rosen bridge, or wormhole, is a postulated phenomenon within General Relativity, Einstein's theory that gravity is not a force but is a warping of space-time due to objects with mass.  The idea is that wormholes can join points distant either in time or in space. If an object is massive enough, it can create a funnel-like hole in spacetime so steep that not even light can escape from it—a black hole. In principle, two widely separated black holes can connect like back-to-back trumpet horns to make a shortcut through spacetime called a wormhole. 

This is not totally crazy but is discussed in modern physics as a theoretical possibility, with the major problem being the amount of negative energy of "exotic matter" (dark energy, whatever that is?) required to keep it open. 

Some time ago, due probably due to my ignorance of modern physics, I  had the idea that entanglement could be due to a wormhole connecting the two particles and also that black holes may create worm holes. I claim no priority since it is an obvious idea (especially if you read science fiction, like I do).