Global warming, which will last at least until the end of the 21st century, will bring many new concerns to Russians: the southern regions may suffer from drought, the northern ones will become more fertile, and the polar cities will have to strengthen their homes, Dmitry, Deputy Director for Science of the Earth Cryosphere Institute, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told RIA Novosti Drozdov.
According to the latest forecasts and estimates of climatologists, global warming on Earth will continue, which will lead to a decrease in the area of sea ice in the Arctic and melting of permafrost in most of the north of the European part of Russia. In general, by the end of the 21st century, almost 50% of the area of the modern permafrost zone, permafrost will thaw from the surface and its upper boundary will sink to a certain depth.
Not disastrous
The scientist noted that such temperature conditions on Earth have existed for almost two billion years - this is more than a third of the Earth's age, and if the changes were stronger, then all living things would either burn out or freeze. He believes that no matter how much a person “tries,” there is no reason to think that in the next 100 years the changes will become catastrophic.
“If the warming by 2100 occurs by three degrees, then, accordingly, the soil will be warmed up two times less - about 1.5 degrees. The landscape boundaries will move a little to the north in our hemisphere. Suppose the rate of warming will be the same as now, about a kilometer per year. That is, by the end of the century, the landscapes will move another 80 kilometers. If there are ten thousand kilometers from the equator to the pole, then from this distance the usual landscapes will shift by a total of 100-200 kilometers,”the scientist said.
He explained that people living in the permafrost zone, due to its weakening, will have to reconstruct their homes, and in regions such as, for example, the Stavropol or Krasnodar Territories, it will become a little warmer and drier, which means that agriculture will need a powerful irrigation.
“On the other hand, less southern regions like the Voronezh region will be involved in favorable agriculture, where it will become a little warmer. The same is in South Siberia. And the northernmost regions will remain frozen. It was, for example, on the Taimyr Peninsula an average of minus ten degrees, and will be minus seven degrees. All the same, there will be the same permafrost,”Drozdov noted.
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Permafrost boundary
The most difficult situation, according to the scientist, will be observed in the transition zone near the Arctic Circle, where there are frozen and thawed areas. In this zone, the impact of warming will be most noticeable.
“These are cities such as Norilsk, Novy Urengoy, Nadym, Salekhard … They are located in the territories where the most noticeable influence of this warming occurs. The ground temperature was, say, minus three degrees, but it became minus one. The strength of soils is highly dependent on temperature. Due to the fact that strength decreases with increasing temperature, the bearing capacity of buildings decreases. That is, if the engineering calculations were made on the basis that the soil was like a rock, then this rock will become softer,”he said.
Drozdov noted that in this strip, the bearing capacity of soils has already decreased by 30% over the past 30-40 years, and therefore houses that were not made with a large margin of safety were promisingly in an emergency condition.
As an illustrative example of permafrost retreat, he cited the Urengoyskoye oil and gas condensate field, which began to be developed in the 1970s - then the field was completely located on the permafrost.
“Since then, the temperature has increased by one and a half to two degrees and somewhere the permafrost roof has dropped by five to seven meters, that is, the permafrost has disappeared from the surface. But there were no catastrophic changes in the landscape. For 40 years, the permafrost boundary has shifted about 40 kilometers to the north. A small forest - larch trees - appeared in the open areas … This is exactly the border between continuous permafrost and discontinuous, where thawed and frozen areas alternate. The permafrost border moved to the north, but nothing terrible happened, Drozdov said.
Gotta get ready
Thus, the scientist believes that due to warming and a gradual shift of the permafrost boundary to the north, the conditions of life on Earth will change, but not critically. According to him, this has happened more than once in the history of the planet.
“The main thing, on the one hand, is that there is no hapiness, that we will live like this, and on the other hand, not to be afraid that“everything is gone”. We must objectively look into the future. Yes, there is a warming, with it some regions will remain frozen and low-temperature, and somewhere it will be a little warmer and there will be a transition from permafrost to thawed soils on the surface. Accordingly, everything should be built and operated with this in mind,”Drozdov summed up.