Arctic Land Permafrost is beyond the Tipping Point

There are around 1.5 trillion metric tons of carbon locked in the land permafrost of the Arctic Circle region. To put that into perspective, human fossil fuel emissions are around 34 billion metric tons per year of CO2 (9.3 billion metric tons of carbon), which means that there are about 160 years worth of emissions in carbon locked up in the permafrost of the Arctic region.