My note before I post the rest of this: none of this stuff that is happening “on the planet” is threatening “to the planet.” The planet will tool along, happy as shit, doing what planets do, even though it will be and look different than it did 2,000 years ago. It will continue to wink and nod to its friends and neighbors Mars and Venus and not give a damn about what lives on it. What this stuff means is that these changes are threats to us, us humans. Maybe if we started thinking about fucking ourselves over and quit phrasing our worries about screwing the planet, we can more acutely focus on the real problem, and start coming up with answers quicker than a bunny.
As permafrost melts, a Swiss cheese-like landscape forms in the Arctic. (Photo: Steve Jurvetson/Wiki Commons)
Excerpt:
Massive “slumps” are forming like a pox across the Northern Hemisphere — deep craters that appear like gateways to the underworld — and they could represent an ominous sign of what’s to come, reports The Independent.
The largest of these so-called megaslumps is Batagaika crater in Siberia, a kilometer-long crevasse that’s 90 meters deep. The unusual chasm appears almost as if the land is turning itself inside out. Even more frightening, it’s widening by up to 20 meters a year, slowly encroaching upon the landscape like a living thing.
The cause of these eerie sinkholes is melting permafrost — the frozen soil and rock that makes up the bulk of the Arctic landscape. As our planet continues to warm, the permafrost thaws and the Earth loosens and slumps. This process not only disfigures the terrain, but it also releases dangerous greenhouse gases into the air that had otherwise been trapped by the frozen ground’s grip.
The release of greenhouse gases — most notably, methane — from melting permafrost is what is known as a climate feedback loop. As the planet warms, more permafrost melts and more greenhouse gases get released into the atmosphere, which leads to more warming and even more thawing, and so on. Once a process like this gets triggered, it becomes very difficult to stop. This is one reason that researchers warn that megaslumps like the Batagaika crater represent major threats to our planet’s climate. They’re an omen, a symptom, of a larger underlying disease.
