The active layer can be deduced from the size of the trees as they need deep roots to not fall over, and to get at the water they need in summer.
But the point of the photo was to sow fear that melting permafrost will cause hills to fall down.
Hills fall down even if frozen solid just as glaciers fall down. Ice is not a solid like minerals are solid. That's why ice skaters can slide - the pressure forms a hydrodynamic layer of water. Ice skating on sand grains, silt or clay doesn't work.
Of course the hills fall faster if the water is water rather than ice but ice in the ground doesn't stop soil sliding downhill due to normal erosion processes.
As the little ice age ended and glaciers melted so did and does the water in soil.
What matters is air temperature. That has been monitored for 100 years fairly well and very well for 40 years and pretty good for a few hundred years with less precision, but well enough to know about medieval warming, Mongol success, Greenland success, Maori migration to the freezing south (not so freezing in warmer climate).
Over the last 50 years there actually has not been the expected tropospheric heating that the simplistic Greenhouse Effect so-called Settled Science predicted.
There has been not even 1 degree Kelvin over 130 years of colossal CO2 production which raised CO2 enormously from 280ppm to 400 ppm and rising.
It's going to be harder to keep CO2 output up because people dislike paying for oil, coal, gas = they look for cheaper things such as insulation, heat pumps, bicycles, buses, trains, photovoltaics, nuclear reactors, electric cars, Cyberspace, couriers, walking, living in warmer climates, doing different things for fun, etc etc.
Peak People in 2037 and continued technological development will mean reducing CO2 output.
It does not seem that CO2 is the problem predicted 35 years ago when I got involved. When scientific predictions are bung, that means the theories are bung.
That's the most basic fact of science.
Starting with false premises is a big problem in science theories. The big false premise of the Greenhouse Effect is that Earth is in Balance.
It isn't and never was, other than superficially and ephemerally.
Mqurice
PS Even the 1 degree Kelvin increase since the 19th century can't assuredly be due to the CO2 increase. There are too many variables such as high altitude clouds induced by incoming cosmic action.
The natural end of the Little Ice Age seems likely to be the main cause with more ground being exposed to sunlight as the snow melted causing a feedback loop of heating.
The active layer obviously didn't exist during the last glaciation as water freezes from the surface down. Go a bit deeper and find heat from inside Earth. |
