Tag: Siberia

And now the bad news…

methaneSpits.gifActive 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 Holloway London and IFM-Geomar in Germany) found more than 250 plumes of bubbles of methane gas rising from the seabed of the West Spitsbergen continental margin at depths of 150 to 400 metres. From the press release:

Graham Westbrook Professor of Geophysics at the University of Birmingham, warns: “If this process becomes widespread along Arctic continental margins, tens of megatonnes of methane per year – equivalent to 5-10% of the total amount released globally by natural sources, could be released into the ocean.”

New Scientist expands the story somewhat, and looks at the total potential methane release in the region:

The methane being released from hydrate in the 600-square-kilometre area studied probably adds up to 27 kilotonnes a year, which suggests that the entire hydrate deposit around Svalbard could be releasing 20 megatonnes a year.

With global methane emissions of the order of 500 – 600 megatonnes per year, that’s a substantial potential addition to the global budget — and there’s a lot more methane hydrate on the East Siberian Shelf that is already showing signs of breaking down.

(*) Westbrook, G.K. et al. Escape of methane gas from the seabed along the West Spitsbergen continental margin. Geophysical Research Letters, 2009; DOI: 10.1029/2009GL039191 (preprint here: well worth a read)

The inner mounting flame

Burningice.jpg

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 gases completely irrelevant. These concerns will not be news to Hot Topic regulars (try the methane and Arctic tags for earlier posts and background), but a thorough overview by Fred Pearce in last week’s New Scientist (Arctic meltdown is a threat to all humanity) pulls all the threads together and presents them in a compelling fashion. Pearce begins by looking at the experiences of Katey Walter:

“I am shocked, truly shocked,” says Katey Walter, an ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “I was in Siberia a few weeks ago, and I am now just back in from the field in Alaska. The permafrost is melting fast all over the Arctic, lakes are forming everywhere and methane is bubbling up out of them.”

Back in 2006, in a paper in Nature, Walter warned that as the permafrost in Siberia melted, growing methane emissions could accelerate climate change. But even she was not expecting such a rapid change. “Lakes in Siberia are five times bigger than when I measured them in 2006. It’s unprecedented. This is a global event now, and the inertia for more permafrost melt is increasing.”

Not good news.

Continue reading “The inner mounting flame”

Reelin’ in the year

IPYWMO.jpg 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, there’s been a blizzard (…sorry) of stories from the teams working at both ends of the world, and they make fascinating reading. From huge pools of freshwater building up in the Arctic Ocean to new mountain ranges as big as the Alps under Antarctica, methane plumes off Siberia and the death knell for summer sea ice in the Arctic, there’s a lot to cover…

Continue reading “Reelin’ in the year”

The heater

global_energy_budget_in.png 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 follow, but not dumbed-down explanation of how the earth and its atmosphere respond to energy arriving from the sun, with some superb illustrations — and astronaut photographs. Well worth a read, and a useful reference on the complex reality of the “greenhouse” we live in.

[Mutton Birds]

Cold moments

arcticmethane.jpgMore 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 of the methane were the highest ever measured in the summertime in the Arctic Ocean,” Semiletov said. “We have found methane bubble clouds above the gas-charged sediment and above the chimneys going through the sediment.” [Science Daily, e! Science News]

A reporter at the press conference, who blogs at A Change In The Wind, asked Semiletov if the increase in methane release his team had discovered constituted “a global emergency”. In his blog entry he writes:

[…] his struggle with the question was evident. I tracked him down later, and asked if he felt he was the wrong person to be answering such a huge question. He admitted his discomfort, but said he thought it was the best question he was asked, and insisted:

“I am the person responsible for this research, and I think we have to tell people that something is happening now with the subsea permafrost.”

Why? A Change In The Wind explains:

Semiletov thinks that if just 1% of the ESAS methane is released, it will push total atmospheric methane up to 6 parts per million, and cites researchers such as David Archer in arguing that this would push us past the point of no return, towards runaway global warming.

Six ppm methane is a little over three times the current level, and with a global warming potential of 25, is equivalent to 150 ppm CO2, or 50 years worth of current annual CO2 emissions. There’s no reference to any time scale for this release, but the possibility should be enough to ring alarm bells — and loudly.

[There’s plenty of other Arctic/climate related material to blog from the Fall AGU meeting, and I’ll get to some of it soon, but for the time being Christmas shopping looms…]

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