For quite some time now, researchers have known that the vast amounts of carbon dioxide that are stored in the Arctic permafrost (frozen soils, river deltas and other sediments) will in the future play a significant part in the warming of the planet, but they never had a clear idea of just what extent this influence ... |
6 July 2009
09:52 GMT |
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The first half of the Qingzang railway, connecting mainland China to the Tibet Autonomous Region, was opened in 1984, when authorities inaugurated an 815-kilometer-long section of tracks, stretching from Xining to Golmud. The entire “iron road” was completed in 2006, when an additional 1142 kilometers wer... |
6 May 2009
09:17 GMT |
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Researchers collecting soil samples from several sites in Alaska discovered that a layer of permafrost, buried at a depth of about one meter (3 feet), is mostly made up of organic remains that have great carbon-emitting potential. Professor Chien-Lu Ping, leader of this study, said that this layer could represent a s... |
9 October 2008
08:50 GMT |
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A trip into the Siberian tundra will remind you now of a visit at a cow farm. Because of the scent. But what you smell is not cow dung, but mammoth one: this is the syrupy mud, resulted from the thawing of the permafrost. Just another symptom of global warming: the prehistoric dung lifted from suspended animation. An... |
20 September 2007
04:48 GMT |
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Thousands of years following their extinction, mammoths still help people earn a living. In the Siberian tundra, the frozen grassland high up in the Arctic Circle, the climbing temperature is thawing out the permafrost (the frozen soil) to show off the fossilized bones of prehistoric megafauna like mammoths, woolly r... |
19 September 2007
06:39 GMT |
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