New Research: Feedback between Permafrost Carbon and Climate

Charlie Koven, scientist in Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division, discusses newly published research results in LBNL’s News Center today.

As global warming causes soil temperatures to increase, some of the billions of tons of carbon frozen in Arctic permafrost will will be released into the atmosphere, and accelerate climate change. This is a big unknown. Now there’s a simple model of permafrost carbon based on direct observations of carbon in Arctic permafrost.

Publication: Koven et al., “A simplified, data-constrained approach to estimate the permafrost carbon-climate feedback,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 373 (2054), 5 Oct 2015, DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2014.0423, is available online now.

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