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Political revenge. Project 2025. Mass deportations. Unfathomable corruption. An all-out assault on democracy. We must start 2025 strong. Our Year-End campaign is our most important fundraiser of the year. Can you pitch in?
Permafrost in the Arctic has stored carbon dioxide for millennia, but the annual Arctic Report Card released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a concerning shift linked to planetary heating and a rising number of wildfires in the icy region: The tundra is now emitting more carbon than it is storing.
The report card revealed that over the last year, the tundra's temperature rose to its second-highest level on record, causing the frozen soil to melt.
The melting of the permafrost activates microbes in the soil which decompose the trapped carbon, causing it to be released into the atmosphere as planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane.
The release of fossil fuels from the permafrost is also being caused by increased Arctic wildfires, which have emitted an average of 207 million tons of carbon per year since 2003.
"Our observations now show that the Arctic tundra, which is experiencing warming and increased wildfire, is now emitting more carbon than it stores, which will worsen climate change impacts," said Rick Spinrad, administrator of NOAA. "This is yet one more sign, predicted by scientists, of the consequences of inadequately reducing fossil fuel pollution."
Sue Natali, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts and one of 97 international scientists who contributed to the Arctic Report Card, told NPR that 1.5 trillion tons of carbon are still being stored in the tundra—suggesting that the continued warming of the permafrost could make it a huge source of planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.
Along with the "Arctic tundra transformation from carbon sink to carbon source," NOAA reported declines in caribou herds and increasing winter precipitation.
The report card showed that the autumn of 2023 and summer of 2024 saw the second- and third-warmest temperatures on record across the Arctic, and a heatwave in August 2024 set an all-time record for daily temperatures in several communities in northern Alaska and Canada.
The last nine years have been the nine warmest on record in the Arctic region.
"Many of the Arctic's vital signs that we track are either setting or flirting with record-high or record-low values nearly every year," said Gerald (J.J.) Frost, a senior scientist with Alaska Biological Research, Inc. and a veteran Arctic Report Card author. "This is an indication that recent extreme years are the result of long-term, persistent changes, and not the result of variability in the climate system."
Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, emphasized that the continuous release of fossil fuel emissions from oil and gas extraction and other pollution has caused the Arctic to warm at a faster rate than the Earth as a whole over the past 11 years.
"These combined changes are contributing to worsening wildfires and thawing permafrost to an extent so historic that it caused the Arctic to be a net carbon source after millennia serving as a net carbon storage region," said Ekwurzel. "If this becomes a consistent trend, it will further increase climate change globally."
The Arctic Report Card was released weeks before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office. Trump has pledged to slash climate regulations introduced by the Biden administration and to increase oil and gas production. He has mused that sea-level rise will create "more oceanfront property" and has called the climate crisis a "hoax," while his nominee for energy secretary, Chris Wright, the CEO of the fracking company Liberty Energy, has claimed that climate warming is good for the planet.
"These sobering impacts in the Arctic are one more manifestation of how policymakers in the United States and around the world are continuing to prioritize the profits of fossil fuel polluters over the well-being of people and the planet and putting the goals of the Paris climate agreement in peril," said Ekwurzel. "All countries, but especially wealthy, high-emitting nations, need to drastically reduce heat-trapping emissions at a rapid pace in accord with the latest science and aid in efforts of climate-vulnerable communities to prepare for what's to come and help lower-resourced countries working to decrease emissions too."
Three decades of a consistent warming trend have made a greener Arctic the new normal, and "widespread, sustained changes" are set to come to region, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in an assessment this week.
While its newest annual Arctic Report Card doesn't reveal the series of record-setting events seen in last year's analysis, the NOAA says the warming trend remains clear.
"The Arctic caught a bit of a break in 2013 from the recent string of record-breaking warmth and ice melt of the last decade," David M. Kennedy, NOAA's deputy under-secretary for operations, told press at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco. "But the relatively cool year in some parts of the Arctic does little to offset the long-term trend of the last 30 years: the Arctic is warming rapidly, becoming greener and experiencing a variety of changes, affecting people, the physical environment, and marine and land ecosystems."
The yearly assessment, based on contributions from over 147 authors, shows that the Arctic had its sixth warmest year on record; the Arctic sea ice extent was the sixth smallest on record, and the seven lowest recorded sea ice extents happened in the last seven years. Further, the thickness of the ice continues to decrease. The decreased ice coverage has brought warmer than average temperatures to Arctic boundary waters in the summer of 2013. The North American snow cover was the fourth lowest on record, while the snow cover in May over Eurasia hit a record low.
Some caribou and reindeer populations hit unusually low numbers, while climate change appears to be pushing some fish from warming waters into the Arctic.
"The Arctic Report Card presents strong evidence of widespread, sustained changes that are driving the Arctic environmental system into a new state and we can expect to see continued widespread and sustained change in the Arctic," said Martin Jeffries, principal editor of the 2013 Report Card, science adviser for the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, and research professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
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The NOAA provided this video to accompany the report card:
