Tag: Siberia

It’s a gas, gas, gas

arcticmethane.jpg It’s not good news. The USA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has produced its annual report on greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, and carbon dioxide concentration continues its accelerated growth. And there are signs that methane levels are beginning to rise, after a decade of remaining more or less static. The BBC reports:

NOAA figures show CO2 concentrations rising by 2.4 parts per million (ppm) from 2006 to 2007. By comparison, the average annual increase between 1979 and 2007 was 1.65ppm.

The methane rise is worrying because it’s a very powerful greenhouse gas (23 times as effective at trapping heat as CO2), and there are a number of positive feedbacks that could come into play as the planet warms. From the NOAA release:

Rapidly growing industrialization in Asia and rising wetland emissions in the Arctic and tropics are the most likely causes of the recent methane increase, said scientist Ed Dlugokencky from NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory. ”We’re on the lookout for the first sign of a methane release from thawing Arctic permafrost,” said Dlugokencky. “It’s too soon to tell whether last year’s spike in emissions includes the start of such a trend.”

Permafrost is one thing, methane hydrates are another. Sometimes called burning ice, methane hydrates (aka clathrates) are a mixture of ice and methane that exist in large quantities on the sea floor – and there are particularly large amounts in the shallow Arctic seas north of Russia and Siberia (more info at Climate Progress). At the recent European Geophysical Union conference in Vienna, a Russian scientist discussed the issue. From SpiegelOnline:

In the permafrost bottom of the 200-meter-deep sea [off the northern coast of Siberia], enormous stores of gas hydrates lie dormant in mighty frozen layers of sediment. The carbon content of the ice-and-methane mixture here is estimated at 540 billion tons. “This submarine hydrate was considered stable until now,” says the Russian biogeochemist Natalia Shakhova, currently a guest scientist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who is also a member of the Pacific Institute of Geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Vladivostok.

The permafrost has grown porous, says Shakhova, and already the shelf sea has become “a source of methane passing into the atmosphere.” The Russian scientists have estimated what might happen when this Siberian permafrost-seal thaws completely and all the stored gas escapes. They believe the methane content of the planet’s atmosphere would increase twelvefold. “The result would be catastrophic global warming,” say the scientists.

The SpeigeOnline article is worth reading in full. Shakova’s observations of methane emissions hint at an explanation for the increase in global atmospheric methane. If that’s the case – and its too early to say for sure – then we may be seeing the beginnings of one of the most worrying of the positive carbon cycle feedbacks – one that could potentially make anything we do to cut CO2 emissions the equivalent of pissing in the wind.

[Hat tip for the Spiegel piece to No Right Turn – I’m frankly amazed the EGU paper hasn’t had much more coverage in the world’s media.]

[Update for the interested: The EGU abstract for Shakhova’s paper is here [PDF]. Here’s the last few words:

“…we consider release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage as highly possible for abrupt release at any time. That may cause ~ 12-times increase of modern atmospheric methane burden with consequent catastrophic greenhouse warming.”

“Abrupt release at any time”. That’s truly alarming.]

Winter wonderland

205188main_2007ice_anomaly.jpg Climate cranks are keen to paint the last northern hemisphere (boreal) winter as unusually cold – a clear sign, they say, that “global warming is over”, and that global cooling has begun. Every crank’s at it: Bob Carter at Muriel’s place, Gerrit van der Lingen in an article in a Christchurch magazine and Vincent Gray in a submission to the select committee looking into the Emissions Trading Bill. It’s nonsense. The winter was cooler than many recent ones – but still 16th warmest, according to NOAA. A strong La Niña is cooling the tropical Pacific, and dragging the global average down, the precise converse of the strong El Niño that made 1998 so hot. In other words it’s weather noise, not long term change, as Stu Ostro explains at the Weather Channel. However, the cranks are right about one thing: last winter was unusual, but not for the reasons they think. In this post, I want to explore some of the reasons why this winter was out of the ordinary, and why I think it may demonstrate that rapid climate change is happening now. It’s an expanded version of how I began my last two talks…

Continue reading “Winter wonderland”

More ice/less ice

PolarsternMore on the Arctic melt: the National Snow and Ice Data Centre updates its commentary on this year’s record ice minimum. As of yesterday, the five day moving average of ice was still moving downwards, but slowly. Their comment on the North West Passage is interesting.

The main, deep channel of the Northwest Passage (Lancaster Sound to M’Clure Strait) has been open, or nearly ice-free, for about five weeks (since August 11, approximately). Of note is the northernmost ice edge ever recorded, at 85.5 degrees North, near the 160 degrees east longitude line.

Meanwhile, the RV Polarstern (see pic), near to completing a voyage through the Arctic as a contribution to International Polar Year, reports that large areas of this year’s ice have only been 1m thick – a 50% reduction on only 6 years ago. When the ship got close to the pole, it started raining. Ursula Schauer wrote (in early September):

A whole day of rain within 150 km of the North Pole came somewhat as a surprise! For the past few weeks, one low-pressure system after another has continuously carried warm air from northern Siberia (15°C at the Lena estuary!) towards the central Arctic Ocean. In this way the sea ice disintegrates more and more right before our eyes.

Meanwhile, I’ve bet Stoat (aka William Connolley) that 2008 will beat 2007’s record low. But only £10…

On thin ice

Glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula are thinning and speeding up, according to new research by the British Antarctic Survey. They tracked 300 glaciers using aerial and satellite imagery, and report that 87% are retreating. Ice flow has speeded up by 12% from 1993 to 2003. From the BAS press release:

These observations – that echo recent findings from coastal Greenland – indicate that the cause is melting of the lower glaciers, which flow directly into the sea. As they thin, the buoyancy of the ice can lift the glaciers off their rock beds, allowing them to slide faster.

BBC coverage here.

At the other end of the planet, Reuters has been blogging (here and here) the activities of Koni Steffen of the University of Colorado and Jay Zwally from NASA as they make their annual visit to the Swiss Camp research post high on the Greenland ice sheet. Asked if he thought the IPPC’s fourth report underestimated future sea level increase, Steffen did not pull any punches:

I think it definitely underestimated. We complained heavily before it was released and that’s why they added a few lines that if there is a dynamic response of ice sheets the upper uncertainty might be higher. That tells you that the current IPCC report only takes into account the current understanding. We can model melt but we cannot model the dynamics.

And that’s why I keep covering this stuff…

Meanwhile, two Belgian explorers have been walking across the Arctic from Siberia to Greenland, taking snow measurements to help calibrate a new ESA satellite. ESA were able to help them to avoid early sea ice break-up to the northwest of Greenland in the Lincoln Sea. Story here, with some very cool animated pix of sea ice. For a look at the ice today, go to the NSIDC’s sea ice snapshot. Considerable thinning north of Alaska, where last year there was an unusual polynya. Cryospshere Today shows the same thing.