We need to talk about permafrost and its impact on the climate
On The Carbon Copy podcast this week:
In the Global North, up to 15% of the earth’s surface is covered in permafrost. Permafrost is a frozen layer of rocks, soil, ice and partially decomposed plants — and it’s a massive carbon sink.
The earth’s permafrost layer contains 1.5 trillion metric tons of carbon. That’s twice the amount currently in the earth’s atmosphere. And, no surprise, it is melting at an accelerated rate due to climate change.
Read more and listen on The Carbon Copy.
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For 25 years, Robert “Max” Holmes has worked on river systems around the world — the Mekong in Southeast Asia, the Amazon in South America, the Congo in Africa, the Lena in Arctic Russia.
“I ignored the rivers around here for most of that time,” said Holmes, the deputy director and a senior scientist at Woods Hole Research Center. That changed with the gift of a fly rod to his son in 2015. The pair had so much fun fishing that Christmas in Colorado that Holmes researched local rivers and came across the effort to restore the Cape’s sea-run brook trout. Coincidentally, he noticed the paucity of data on those rivers.