Arctic is popping green, hints towards drastic consequences of global climate change
The Arctic Circle captures everyone’s imagination by the colossal amount of snow and frozen landscape etched within the white horizon along side Polar bears.
Arctic is popping green, hints towards drastic consequences of global climate change
The Arctic Circle captures everyone’s imagination by the colossal amount of snow and frozen landscape etched within the white horizon along side Polar bears. But, now this idyllic icy picture of the northernmost snow caps may soon become a land crammed with greenery, because it gets transformed amid the drastic global climate change .
Several studies conducted by NASA scientists paint a dismal picture of the Arctic tundra that’s turning green in its uppermost reaches in Alaska, the Northern coast of Canada, Siberia and in Quebec and Labrador. Such intriguing changes are often attributed to higher temperatures, warm air along side higher soil moisture and temperature.
As a consequence of in depth greening, the grassy tundra is getting converted into shrublands whereas shrublands are gradually becoming denser and thicker. this type of landscape change may have hazardous climatic ramifications within the end of the day as they’ll severely disrupt the regional water cycle additionally to the energy and carbon cycle.
Ecologists from Northern Arizona University believe that the Arctic is one among the coldest biomes on the world but it’s also rapidly getting warm. Such level of warming at an alarming rate, may prove Arctic Circle to be the bellwether in further predicting the risks of worldwide global climate change beyond Arctic.
That said, warming temperatures are changing the tundra landscape into a forest-covered land. this is often further substantiated by estimations that the pace of carbon cycle within the northern swathes of Arctic is at the fastest in 40 years.
Various studies, that are conducted thus far , suppose that from 1985 to 2016 a whopping 38 per cent of tundra land has witnessed greening while just a mere 3 per cent has skilled browning which suggests the fading of the green cover from a substantial portion of land.
The green cover is measured through Geological surveys that provide continuous space-based records of Earth’s vegetation using Landsat satellites. These Landsat satellites use the quantity of visible and near-infrared light reflected by green and leafy vegetation of shrubs and grasses.
Till now, conclusive studies have suggested that an increase in temperature results in the thawing or melting of the permafrost which indeed accelerates the expansion of green plants on the surface then they absorb CO2 through photosynthesis. With warmer temperatures and relatively hotter summer, the quantity of your time , carbon remains stored within the soil of Arctic has been severely curtailed and is being released into the atmosphere in large amounts.
That’s why many scientists are apprehensive of the very fact that it’s perturbed the dynamics of the carbon-cycle as more carbon-dioxide is released into the atmosphere than the quantity getting absorbed by the plants.
