Cheng Feng, a researcher from the School of Earth and Space Science, has made important progress in the study of permafrost stability and carbon release in the Pliocene-Pleistocene

Recently, Feng Cheng, a researcher from the School of Earth and Space Sciences of Peking University, and Professor Carmala Garzione of the University of Arizona, and other domestic and foreign experts, have conducted research on permafrost stability and carbon release in the context of Pliocene-Pleistocene climate change and global warming.

Permafrost refers to soil or rock formations whose soil temperature remains below 0°C and freezes (Biskaborn et al.

Figure 1.

The Pliocene warm period (3.

Cheng Feng and his collaborators selected the Pliocene to Pleistocene lacustrine strata exposed in the alpine permafrost area of ​​the northern margin of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau as the research object, and used cluster isotope (clumped isotope, Δ ₄₇ ) and other climate proxies to reveal the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Figure 2.

The research results pointed out: 1) The annual average air temperature of the northern margin of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau decreased by nearly 8°C around 2.

Figure 3.

It is worth noting that the global alpine permafrost area occupies only one tenth of the global permafrost area, but the carbon released under similar climatic conditions during the Pliocene warm period accounted for nearly four of the total carbon released from the global permafrost area.

Cheng Feng pointed out that most of the alpine permafrost areas in the world today are located on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China.

Figure 4.

The work was published in Nature Communications under the title "Alpine permafrost could account for a quarter of thawed carbon based on Plio-Pleistocene paleoclimate analogue" .

references:

Biskaborn BK, et al.

Schuur EA, et al.

Haywood, AM, Dowsett, HJ & Dolan, AM Integrating geological archives and climate models for the mid-Pliocene warm period.

IPCC.

Burke, K.
et al.
Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates.
Proc.
Natl Acad.
Sci.
USA 115, 13288–13293 (2018).

Cheng, F.
, Garzione, C.
, Li, X.
, Salzmann, U.
, Schwarz, F.
, Haywood, AM, Tindall, J.
, Nie, J.
, Li, L.
, Wang, L.
, Abbott , BW, Elliott, B.
, Liu, W.
, Upadhyay, D.
, Arnold, A.
and Tripati, A.
Alpine permafrost could account for a quarter of thawed carbon based on Plio-Pleistocene paleoclimate analogue.
Nature Communications , 13( 1): 1329 (2022).