Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 08/25/2013 - 08:57
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Arctic Sunlight and Microbial Interactions

Hello Mr. Taterka. I enjoyed reading many of your journal entries and the thawing of permafrost is obviously a large problem. I was wondering if there was any way to prevent the thawed carbon from converting to carbon dioxide or slowing down the thawing of the permafrost. Are scientists looking for ways of prevention?

Thanks so much! -Aidan Cheng

Tue, 08/27/2013 - 05:27

Anonymous

Aidan -
There's no way right now to prevent C from thawing permafrost from becoming CO2. As to prevention, there's certainly a huge group of scientists, politicians and regular people right now all over the world trying to slow down climate change which would slow the thawing of permafrost, but this year atmospheric CO2 hit an all-time high, so that's not going very well. We can either reduce the amount of CO2 going into the air, or another approach is called "geoengineering" which is finding ways to cool the earth down to counter the effects of warming. At this point it's just an idea; from a technical standpoint it would be very hard to do. We'll talk much more about it this year.
- Mr. T