Climate change is causing diverse variations in the thawing of frozen ground The Tibetan Plateau has experienced prominent warming and wetting since the mid-1990s that has altered the thermal and hydrological properties of its frozen ground. In a new study, published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, scientists used the Community Land Surface Model to uncover that the dual effect of this wetting and the projected increase in precipitation over the Tibetan Plateau in the future is becoming a critical factor in determining the thermodynamics of the frozen ground. The lead author of the study, Dr Xuewei Fang from the School of Atmospheric Sciences at Chengdu University of Information Technology in China, explains that “In the face of the greatest increase in the occurrence frequ...
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Using lake sediment in the Tibetan Plateau, a team of researchers was able to show that permafrost at high elevations is more vulnerable than arctic permafrost under projected future climate conditions From the ancient sludge of lakebeds in Asia's Tibetan Plateau, scientists can decipher a vision of Earth's future. That future, it turns out, will look very similar to the mid-Pliocene warm period – an epoch 3.3 million to 3 million years ago when the average air temperature at mid-latitudes rarely dropped below freezing. It was a time when permanent ice was just beginning to cling to the northern polar regions, and mid-latitude alpine permafrost – or perpetually frozen soil – was much more limited than today. Global permafrost today contains a whopping 1,500 trillion grams of carbon....
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