With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

The entire western Siberian peat bog covers approaching 400,000 square
miles—an area as big as France and Germany combined. Since its formation,
the moss and lichen growing at its surface have been slowly absorbing
massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Because the region is so
cold, the vegetation only partially decomposes, forming an ever-thickening
frozen mass of peat beneath the bog. Perhaps a quarter of all the carbon
absorbed by soils and vegetation on the land surface of Earth since the last
ice age is right here.
The concern now is that as the bog begins to thaw, the peat will
decompose and release its carbon. Unlike the tropical swamps of Borneo,
which are degrading as they dry out, and producing carbon dioxide, the
Siberian bogs will degrade in the wet as the permafrost melts. In fetid
swamps and lakes devoid of oxygen, that will produce methane. Methane is a
powerful and fast-acting greenhouse gas, potentially a hundred times more
potent than carbon dioxide. Released quickly enough in such quantities, it
would create an atmospheric tsunami, swamping the planet in warmth. But
we have to change tense here. For "would create," read "is creating."
In the summer of 2005, I received a remarkable e-mail from a man I had
neither met nor corresponded with, a young Siberian ecologist called Sergei
Kirpotin, of Tomsk State University, in the heart of Siberia. A collaborator of
his at Oxford University had suggested me as a Western outlet for what
Kirpotin in his e-mail called an "urgent message for the world." He had
recently undertaken an expedition across thousands of miles of the empty
western Siberian peatlands between the bleak windswept towns of
Khatany-Mansiysk, Pangody, and Novy Urengoi. Nobody, barring a few