For a long time, the Arctic and Antarctic regions, as the areas with the highest latitude, the lowest temperature and the strongest degree of ice and snow cover on the earth, have become the key targets for scientists to study the natural geography of the earth and climate change, and are also the "barometer" of the earth's ecological environment and climate fluctuations.
From the perspective of the Arctic, the Arctic in the traditional sense refers to the area within the Arctic Circle, that is, the "imaginary circle" enclosed by 66 degrees and 34 minutes north latitude. The area within the Arctic Circle is dominated by the Arctic Ocean, which also includes a part of the land, of which Greenland is the largest, and also includes northern Russia, the United States Alaska, Canada, Sweden, Denmark and Norway.
Because the solar radiation intensity in the Arctic Circle is very small, and there are long polar nights every year, coupled with the flooded ice and snow, so that the reflection rate of the sun's rays is very high, so the climate is very cold, the biomass in the circle is very small, of which the plants are mainly lichens, mosses, only in the Arctic Circle is very close to the edge of the northern temperate zone, there are some coniferous forests, low shrubs and other "high" plants.
Every summer, due to the northward shift of the direct sun, the temperature of the Arctic will also rise significantly, and a large amount of ice and snow will melt, forming a cooler climate. For a long time in history, the melting of ice and snow in the Arctic in summer and the new snowfall in winter basically showed a state of dynamic balance. However, in the more than 100 years since entering the first industrial revolution, greenhouse gas emissions have also increased year by year due to the increase in population and the continuous growth of fossil energy consumption, which has caused an increasingly serious global warming problem, most notably in the Arctic and Antarctic. In the summer of recent years, many areas in the Arctic Circle have experienced abnormal high temperatures of 38 degrees Celsius, a large amount of ice and snow and permafrost have melted, breaking the original balance and making it difficult to return to their original appearance.
For some of the islands within the Arctic Circle and the northern tip of the continent, one of the obvious manifestations of this influence is the increasing number of "deep craters" on the ground. Why do these places, which originally belonged to permafrost areas, appear "deep pits"?
This has to start with the movement of the earth's plates. 200 million years ago, all the continents on the earth were basically connected together, called "Pangea", and later, with the violent movement of the crust plates, this ancient continent began to gradually separate, several subcontinents that split began to "drift" to the north, the climate on the land also changed from wet and rainy to cold and dry, a large number of plants began to die, and only hardy coniferous forests, some shrubs and mosses and other plants were eventually retained.
Under the action of geological movement, those plants that died in large quantities were buried in the ground, gradually forming a layer of peat with a very considerable thickness. Due to the low temperatures, the decomposition rate of these plant remnants is very slow, and the sedimentation and development time of peat is very long. Over time, in the process of slow decomposition of organic matter by microorganisms, a huge amount of methane and other gases have accumulated underground, and due to the low temperature freezing of the soil layer above, these generated gases are "sealed" underground.
However, under the influence of global warming, the top soil of the permafrost area of the Arctic is becoming softer and more ablative, and the more methane and other gases accumulate in the ground, there is a chance to break through the "shackles" of the upper soil, thereby rushing out of the surface and discharging into the atmospheric environment. In different areas, the amount of gas accumulated in the ground is different, the pressure of gas on the upper soil is different, the performance of this gas release is not consistent, some show a state of slow release, that is, we see in some videos of the "soil bubbling"; and some are more intense, gas, pressure, in a short period of time to release huge energy, directly overturn the topsoil, some even violent explosion, in the ground to form a large deep pit.
Since 2013, scientists have successively found nearly 20 huge pits with a depth of 100 meters in the Arctic permafrost area, and over time, these pits have lost the shackles of the surface soil, and the methane gas originally stored in the surrounding area will be easier to "spray out" from the pit, making the scale of the pit larger and deeper.
According to the research of relevant institutions, only in the north Siberian region of Russia, from the 90s of the last century to the present, almost 5% of the surface, has undergone obvious geomorphological deformation, such as the phenomenon of being pushed out of the "bulge" by gas, the collapse of the ground, the emergence and disappearance of deep pit lakes, etc. This change has a very strong positive correlation with the increase in the average temperature in the Arctic region, which not only has a serious impact on people and the ecological environment living in the Arctic and surrounding areas, but also has a chain effect on the global climate.
On the one hand, a large amount of methane gas gushing out of the pit itself is a greenhouse gas that is more powerful than carbon dioxide, and its warming capacity is about 28 times stronger than carbon dioxide, once these gases enter the earth's atmosphere in large quantities, then it will aggravate the global greenhouse effect, thereby further accelerating the ablation of the permafrost area, thus forming a vicious circle, which is basically an irreversible process.
In the second aspect, further intensified global warming will accelerate the melting rate of glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic, which will trigger a series of problems such as sea level rise at a faster rate, disordered global water circulation, frequent extreme meteorological events, and large-scale forest fires.
In the third aspect, as methane gas is released from the Arctic permafrost, a large number of ancient bacteria and viruses that were originally "frozen" and dormant will also "see the light of day" to the surface of the earth, expanding the scope with atmospheric circulation and water flow, thus posing a potential, inevitable and unknown threat to the earth's ecosystem, including human beings themselves.
The emergence of arctic pits is a microcosm of human influence on the earth's natural environment, and they can also be used as a warning to the earth to our human beings, if human beings do not fundamentally change their way of life and mode of production, once this impact exceeds the naturally controllable and restorable critical boundary, then greater and more disasters will be in front of us. Man and nature coexist in harmony, the road is obstructed and long, we need to walk without quitting, and the future can be expected.