Siberia

The Climate Show #23: Durban and the return of the electric car

by Gareth December 21, 2011

Grab some holly, deck your halls, heat up some mince pies, and then settle down to the last Climate Show of 2011. We look at the outcome of the Durban conference, discuss heavy rain in New Zealand and record-breaking weather extremes in the USA, and ponder the implications of news of more methane erupting from [...]

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Siberian seabed methane: first numbers

by Gareth March 5, 2010

The latest estimate of methane release from the shallow seas off the north coast of Russia — the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) — suggests that around 8 teragrams per year (1Tg = 1 million tonnes) of the gas are reaching the atmosphere. This is equivalent to previous estimates of total methane release from all [...]

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Siberian Shelf methane increased in 2009

by Gareth January 8, 2010

Methane release from the permafrost and hydrates under the East Siberian Shelf in autumn 2009 was the highest ever recorded, the leader of the International Siberian Shelf Study (ISSS), Igor Semiletov, has told the BBC. The results of last autumn’s research cruises are being prepared for publication in the near future. The BBC also quotes [...]

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And now the bad news…

by Gareth August 18, 2009

Active methane plumes over the West Spitsbergen shelf discovered last summer are being driven by warming of an ocean current over the last 30 years, a new study(*) reports. The team on the British research vessel the James Clark Ross from the National Oceanography Centre Southampton (working with scientists from the University of Birmingham, Royal [...]

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The inner mounting flame

by Gareth March 31, 2009

The rapid climate change underway in the Arctic has the potential to disrupt weather patterns around the planet, and brings with it the risk that methane bubbling out of the permafrost that rings the Arctic Ocean and from gas hydrates under the sea floor could make our attempts to restrain emissions and stabilise atmospheric greenhouse [...]

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Reelin’ in the year

by Gareth February 25, 2009

The International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-8 formally draws to a close today, and when today arrives in Geneva there will be a press conference to mark the release of a summary report, The State of Polar Research [PDF], which covers some of the preliminary findings. [BBC report here]. In the run up to this event, [...]

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The heater

by Gareth January 19, 2009

While some on the crank fringe fixate over a “global cooling” (that ain’t happening), the imbalance in our planet’s heat budget has inevitable — and inexorable — consequences for our climate. More heat’s coming into the system than can leave, as this excellent new article at NASA’s Earth Observatory spells out. It’s an easy to [...]

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Cold moments

by Gareth December 20, 2008

More data on the state of the methane hydrates on the Siberian shelf emerged during the American Geophysical Union’s Fall meeting in San Francisco this week. At a press conference covering recent work in the Arctic, Igor Semiletov, the leader of the team working on the Yakov Smirnitsky last (Arctic) summer, told reporters: “The concentrations [...]

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In the heat of the (Arctic) night

by Gareth November 2, 2008

Time for an Arctic update and a bit of “original” research. There’s been quite a bit of polar news around, and a rapid freeze-up is underway in the Arctic – so rapid that some are declaring that the sea ice is “back to normal” for the time of year, based on this graph from the [...]

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Something in the air (methane mystery)

by Gareth October 30, 2008

Atmospheric methane levels “shot up” in 2007, according to a paper in this week’s Geophysical Research Letters (MIT news release — Rigby, M., R. Prinn, et al (2008), Renewed growth of atmospheric methane, Geophys. Res. Lett., doi:10.1029/2008GL036037, in press. PDF here for AGU members.). This confirms NOAA’s announcement in April that methane levels were on [...]

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