Vice news on YouTube.. long 2.5 hr documentary about the scientist and his family. Before him, nobody realized permafrost held sooooo much carbon about to be released into the atmosphere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ucmiJiEHJ4&list=LL&index=10&t=825s
Summary: Sergey and his son are convinced, and some other scientists back Sergey up, that having 400 million large herbivores in Siberia, Alaska, Canada, etc. would cool the ground more. Why? They eat grass, they scrape the snow out of the way to get to the grass in winter... since snow is s good insulator you want it out of the way to allow the coldest air to cool the ground more. They say measurements show the ground is 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 F)
[edit correction? Other YouTube video by Atlas Pro, Pleistocene park…says ground went from -5 C to -30 Celsius when animals trampled snow!!!! Also hooves vs moss helps grass grow]
colder where the animals are eating the grass in the winter. And, there were way less trees/shrub back a million years ago through 12,000 years ago b/c the herbivores were eating all that grass. This lines up with the way elk or deer were eating the baby saplings in Yellowstone, so it all sort of makes sense at a glance. Crazy and interesting. The amount of mammoth bones falling out of the melting permafrost on those mini-cliffs is no joke, it's a TON of bones that have been there for 12,000 to I think 60,000 years ago. Scary.
How much carbon in permafrost? MIT says a lot... A LOT A LOT,... twice that of our current atmosphere... and Sergey said the same thing on that documentary. Think of it this way... Wikipedia says that humans released about " In 2010, 9.14 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC, equivalent to 33.5 gigatonnes of CO2 or about 4.3 ppm in Earth's atmosphere) were released from fossil fuels and cement production worldwide, compared to 6.15 GtC in 1990."
https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/permafrost ->There’s a huge amount of carbon stored in permafrost — an estimated 1,500 gigatons, or twice as much as the atmosphere contains.
Sergey Zimov
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