As climate warming stokes longer fire seasons and more severe fires in the North American boreal forest, being able to calculate how much carbon each fire burns grows more urgent. New research led by Northern Arizona University and published this week in Nature Climate Change suggests that how much carbon burns depends… Read more
Ted Schuur
NAU researchers on team finding stocks of vulnerable carbon twice as high where permafrost subsidence is a factor
New research from a team including scientists of the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) at Northern Arizona University suggests that subsidence—gradually sinking terrain caused by the loss of ice and soil mass in permafrost—is causing deeper thaw than previously thought and making vulnerable twice as much carbon as estimates that don’t account for this shifting ground. These findings, published this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research:… Read more
The frozen world and oceans at risk, says new UN special report co-authored by NAU researchers
Sept. 25, 2019
The world’s oceans are getting hotter and acidifying under climate change at unprecedented rates, threatening coastal and high-mountain communities, marine ecosystems and global fishing stocks, according to a new Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) released this week by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Ted Schuur, a researcher in the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) at Northern Arizona University, was one of the lead authors on the… Read more
Larger, more frequent fires in the boreal forest threaten previously protected carbon stores, NAU-led research team reports in Nature
Pools of old carbon in the soil of boreal forests historically safe from combustion are being released by more frequent and larger wildfires, a team led by researchers at Northern Arizona University announced in Nature this week. As the climate of these forests in the Northwest Territories of Canada becomes warmer and drier and prone to more frequent… Read more
NAU scientists publish first estimate of carbon emissions from 2014 mega-fires in Canada’s boreal forests
The boreal forest is home to one-third of the Earth’s forest cover and stores 40 percent of the planet’s terrestrial carbon. North America’s boreal forest alone, which spans the northern portion of the continent from Alaska all the way to Newfoundland, covers an astounding 1.5 billion acres—more than 2.3 million square miles.
As mega-fires in the boreal forest become more frequent and more intense, scientists believe the burning of these… Read more
NAU’s Permafrost Carbon Network study links climate policy to reduced effects of emissions from thawing soil
Findings of a new study organized by the Permafrost Carbon Network (PCN) suggest that putting more effective greenhouse gas controls in place for the rest of this century could help mitigate the effects of climate change on the release of carbon from thawing soils of the northern permafrost region.
The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represents a collaboration between ecosystem scientists Ted Schuur and Christina… Read more