The Siberian tundra might just vanish by 2500, provided the greenhouse gas emissions are dramatically curtailed.
Also, in the best-case scenarios, two-thirds of this landscape, as interpreted by its short thriving season and cover of grasses, moss, shrubs, and lichens, could disappear and leave behind two fragments separated by 1,553 miles or 2,500 kilometers. The scientists themselves recently predicted this outcome. While the tundra’s permafrost cap melts away, it might release enormous amounts of stored greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, potentially stimulating global warming.
“This was stunning for us to see how quickly the tundra will be turned over to forest,” announced the ecologist and forest modeler Stefan Kruse of the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, located in Germany. The casualty of the tundra is not merely a hit towards biodiversity and human civilization, but that might also deteriorate the Arctic warming, Kruse warned Live Science.
The researchers discovered that once the trees start parading northward in response to heating up, that they perform so quickly they are not feasible to retreat again when the temperatures cool down. Regarding a scenario in which carbon emissions are curtailed to zero by 2100, and global temperature increase stays below 3.6 degrees F, only 32.7% of today’s tundra would stay by 2500. This percentage would be divided into mini-tundras – first in Chukotka in the distant east and second on the Taymyr Peninsula in the far north.
