researchers are developing a simulator to anticipate the melting of permafost
The melting permafrost, a consequence of global warming, worries researchers. Permafrost, also called permafrost in English, refers to frozen ground whose temperature remains below the threshold of 0°C for at least two consecutive years. According to studies, its melting would be earlier than expected and could release millions of tons of CO2, methane and even mercury into the atmosphere, which would warm it even more.
In order to model in detail the multiple effects of the gradual melting of permafrost, researchers from Paul Sabatier University have developed a new permafrost simulator in Toulouse.
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Anticipating the impacts of the thaw as well as possible
It is the invention of a team from the Toulouse Environmental Geosciences Laboratory (GET). Their objective: to model the permafost in order to best anticipate the impacts of its thaw as well as the modification of the soil.
The presence of permafrost notably modifies water flows, soil stability and environmental conditions in multiple ways, which is not without consequences for ecosystems and human activities in cold regions”, explains the team.
The simulator developed by the GET laboratory is therefore more relevant than ever, as researchers fear that the melt is reaching a point of no return. Nevertheless, a problem is raised by the Toulouse team: “this type of modeling is particularly difficult because of the non-linearities and the couplings characterizing the physical processes involved: the transfers of water and heat in porous media with periods of freezing and thawing”, they explain.
Powerful supercomputers
This was without counting the “latest generation supercomputers” of GET. Capable of using hundreds of thousands of processors simultaneously, the permafrost simulator was designed with OpenFOAM open source software. A supercomputing benchmark for computational fluid mechanics. The Toulouse researchers also relied on two of the most powerful supercomputers called CALMIP and GENCI.
This tool is currently used to quantify the melting of permafrost on a centennial scale on four environmental monitoring sites in Eurasia Boreal as part of the ANR HiPerBorea project”, inform the Toulouse researchers.
They affirm in particular that “the effective possibility of testing several scenarios of climate change for each of the sites is made effective by the first results obtained”.
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