The Looming Arctic Collapse: More than 40% of North Russian Buildings are Starting to Crumble
The heat is on, and it is hitting the Arctic with detrimental consequence. Global warming is now leading to quick and irreversible change in the North. And Russia is among the ones worst affected.
This week, the temperatures in the Russian north again beat records. In Saskylah, a small community in the Arctic Circle, the air temperature reached 31.9 C, the highest measurement since 1936. According to Roshydromet, the Russian meteorology institute, average temperatures along parts of the Russian Arctic coast have since 1998 increased byas much as 4.95 C degrees.
Minister of Natural Resources Aleksandr Kozlov
The development is of growing concern in Moscow. The country’s Minister of Natural Resources Aleksandr Kozlov minister confirms that more than 40 percent of all buildings in the North are now experiencing deformation in their building structure. And the construction of roads and railways is getting increasingly difficult, he said in a round table discussion in late May.
According to Kozlov, the melting ground is today the underlying reason for 23 percent of all technical system failure in the region, and up to 29 percent of oil and gas production facilities can no longer be operated.
Leading Russian researchers estimate that the degrading ground by year 2050 will inflict damages worth about five trillion rubles (€58 billion). That is equal to about 25 percent of the total Russian federal budget.
“What will happen with our towns in ten, fifty, hundred years?” governor of the far northern Yamal-Nenets region Dmitry Artyukhov asked during the conference. He is concerned about the comprehensive ongoing construction works in his region, much of which is made without regionally adjusted technology.
According to Artyukhov, the latest geological maps from the region dates back to the 1980s.
“The construction workers that today come to any project [in the region] do not have a clear-cut document that describes how the permafrost works and what solidity margins that are needed in order to make the buildings last for their due time,” the regional leader said.
The Russian Ministry of Natural Resources this year launches a new state monitoring system for the permafrost. The system will be based on existing research installations managed by state meteorological authority Roshydromet, and two development phases are envisaged.
The first pilot phase will cover the period 2022-2024 and be based on experiences and methodology applied in Spitsbergen, Franz Josef Land and Severnaya Zemlya, the Ministry of Natural Resources informs.
The permafrost melting is already affecting operators of Arctic infrastructure, including oil and gas installations. Experts have argued that the spill of 21,000 tons of diesel oil in the Taymyr Peninsula in 2020 came after the ground under a major oil storage tank degraded.
Researchers from the Russian Cryosphere Institute believe that the border of the permafrost zone over the last 40 years has moved more than 30 km to the north and that up to 500 square kilometers of land is every year sliding into the Arctic ocean and disappearing.
This process is irreversable, and it is impossible to stop it, Head of the Russian Cryosphere Institute Dmitry Drozdev said.
With the melting of the frozen tundra comes also growing risks of new and lethal diseases. Among the many infectious disease agents preserved in the permafrost is Anthrax.
(Atle is a journalist and publisher of the Barents Observer. Article courtesy: The Barents Observer.)
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‘Wake Up Call’: Rapidly Thawing Permafrost Threatens Trans-Alaska Pipeline
Common Dreams staff
Alaska’s thawing permafrost is undermining the supports that hold up an elevated section of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, putting in danger the structural integrity of one of the world’s largest oil pipelines.
In a worst-case scenario, a rupture of the pipeline would result in an oil spill in a delicate and remote landscape where it would be extremely difficult to clean up.
“This is a wake-up call,” said Carl Weimer, of Pipeline Safety Trust, a nonprofit pipeline watchdog group based in Bellingham, Washington. “The implications of this speak to the pipeline’s integrity and the effect climate change is having on pipeline safety in general.”
A slope where an 810-foot long section of the pipeline is secured has started to slip due to the melting permafrost, in turn, causing the braces holding this section of the pipeline to twist and bend.
According to NBC News, the pipeline supports have been damaged by “slope creep” caused by thawing permafrost, records, and interviews with officials involved with managing the pipeline show.
To combat the problem, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources has approved the use of about 100 thermosyphons — tubes that suck heat out of the permafrost – to keep the frozen slope in place and prevent further damage to the pipeline’s support structure.
“The proposed project is integral to the protection of the pipeline,” according to the department’s November 2020 analysis.
There is some concern in using these cooling tubes – They have never been used as a defensive safeguard once a slope has begun to slide, and the permafrost is already thawing.
Feedback Loop
The Arctic and Alaska are heating twice as fast as the rest of the globe because of global warming. And global warming is driving the thawing of permafrost that the oil industry must keep frozen to maintain the infrastructure that allows it to extract more of the fossil fuels that cause the warming.
Permafrost is ground that has remained completely frozen for at least two years straight and is found beneath nearly 85 percent of Alaska. In the last few decades, permafrost temperatures there have warmed as much as 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
The state’s average temperature is projected to increase 2 to 4 degrees more by the middle of the century, and a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change projects that with every 2-degree increase in temperature, 1.5 million square miles of permafrost could be lost to thawing.
Common Dreams reported in 2019 that the melting of Alaska’s permafrost is rapidly accelerating:
“The northernmost point on the planet is heating up more quickly than any other region in the world. The reason for this warming is ice–albedo feedback: as ice melts it opens up land and sea to the sun, which then absorb more heat that would have been bounced off by the ice, leading to more warming. It’s a vicious circle of warmth that’s changing the environment at the north pole.
“In Alaska, the crisis led this year to the warmest spring on record for the state; one city, Akiak, may turn into an island due to swelling riverbanks and erosion exacerbated by thawing permafrost and ice melt. Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Research Center scientist Susan Natali told The Guardian that what’s happening in Akiak is just an indicator of the danger posed to Alaska by the climate crisis. ‘The changes are really accelerating in Alaska,’ said Natali.”
The Trans-Alaska system was completed in 1977. The 48-inch diameter steel pipeline runs for 800 miles, carrying “hot oil” from America’s largest oil reserve in Prudhoe Bay to the port of Valdez. The pipeline is either buried underground or lifted above the surface in an attempt to prevent the permafrost from melting.
(Article courtesy: Common Dreams, a US non-profit news portal.)
