Maritime permafrost warming, turning frozen methane into greenhouse gas

[Skybird]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...547976,00.html

(...)

It's always been a disturbing what-if scenario for climate researchers: Gas hydrates stored in the Arctic ocean floor -- hard clumps of ice and methane, conserved by freezing temperatures and high pressure -- could grow unstable and release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Since methane is a potent greenhouse gas, more worrisome than carbon dioxide, the result would be a drastic acceleration of global warming. Until now this idea was mostly academic; scientists had warned that such a thing could happen. Now it seems more likely that it will.


Russian polar scientists have strong evidence that the first stages of melting are underway. They've studied largest shelf sea in the world, off the coast of Siberia, where the Asian continental shelf stretches across an underwater area six times the size of Germany, before falling off gently into the Arctic Ocean. The scientists are presenting their data from this remote, thinly-investigated region at the annual conference of the European Geosciences Union this week in Vienna.

In the permafrost bottom of the 200-meter-deep sea, 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 greenhouse-gas potential of methane is 20 times that of carbon dioxide, as measured by the effects of a single molecule.

(...)

The future does not stop to be... interesting...

A greenhouse gas 20 times as potent as CO2, fine, but it becomes even better. What the article is not talking about is the geological stability provided by loose rocks and methanehydrate being frozen together. If this type of ice is melting , you have no longer a solid geological layer at the steep cliffs of the north-atlantic shelfs offcoast the Scandinavian region, but a slide where in a chain reaction biblical ammounts of scree could fall off the shelf's slopes and up to three kilometers down to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean. This effect could produce a cascade that - in worst case scenario - could race along the complete shelf at the length of the Scandinavian coast.

And a maritime earthslide of this dimension would mean an Atlantic Tsunami man cannot remember from history.

It probably depends on the speed of the methanehydrate becoming instable.

[NEON DEON]

Hmm. Where did I put my shovel?:hmm:

[SUBMAN1]

One thing I don't see in the quick comments above - there are already efforts underway to turn this stuff into an alternative fuel source - it has almost perfect properties. Only hitch is keeping it frozen diring harvasting.

-S

[Fish]

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

- there are already efforts underway to turn this stuff into an alternative fuel source - .

-S

Yeah, they have a sail six times the size of Germany to prevent the gas from escaping.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by NEON DEON

Hmm. Where did I put my shovel?:hmm:

In that scenario, several dozen million people must not be concerned with a shovel anymore. And where europe was shown on the map, you can paint most of Central Europe and Britain in light blue. Denmark, at least the northern half of Germany, BE-NE-LUX, at least the North and West of France will be gone. Northern Spain too will take a bashing, with Portugal being affected by serious floodings. Caribean isles as well. The Norwegian fjord coast will be mauled and battered. Almost all settlements on the norwegian coast, and many at the Northamerican Atlantic-coast, will be in complete shatters. Floodings will be felt as far away as South America - and we mean floodings that wash settlements away.

Still want a shovel?

[August]

Sky you really have a thing for doomsday scenarios don't you? They're all i ever see you post anymore....

[Graf Paper]

I honestly think that scientists should be required by law to also have a real job in order to prevent them from engaging in idle speculations such as this matter presented to us here.

The fact is this is indeed all mere speculation because there is no accurate way to measure or predict the effects that are claimed will occur. Since no living human has ever witnessed, let alone quantified, such a catastrophe it would be sheer arrogance to affirm that doom and destruction awaits in such precise terms.

It's probably a sure bet that such marine eruptions of methane have happened before and the Earth is still here, teeming with life. Whether or not Man would survive any such catastrophe is ultimately immaterial in the grand scheme of life. Dinosaurs were far more successful than we are, evolutionarily speaking, but even their reign came to an end. If our number is up, then it just is.

There are literally thousands of methane upwellings from marine permafrost all over the world. One that comes to mind is a fairly large one near Catalina Island, just off the California coast, that has been steadily emitting methane since before records were kept.

This is simply bored scientists rattling the alarm bells in the hopes of getting funding to fatten their wallets and research budgets. Global warming has been a bonanza for climatologists, who used to struggle for funding because they were seen as just overpaid weathermen, the type that give your local forecast on the evening news.

I believe it behooves us as a moral obligation to preserve our Earth, in as much as it is possible, without causing undue human suffering. Environmentalism has almost become a dirty word because of the scare-mongering and profiteering that has corrupted what used to be a worthy philosophy of living in balance with nature.

Keep it coming, Skybird! It's good that you care enough about our Earth to warn us that we must be mindful of how we live. I may not agree with the "junk science" but I do agree with reducing the careless waste of our industrialized consumer frenzy, which has plagued our world and our hearts.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Graf Paper

I honestly think that scientists should be required by law to also have a real job in order to prevent them from engaging in idle speculations such as this matter presented to us here.

The fact is this is indeed all mere speculation because there is no accurate way to measure or predict the effects that are claimed will occur. Since no living human has ever witnessed, let alone quantified, such a catastrophe it would be sheer arrogance to affirm that doom and destruction awaits in such precise terms.

It's probably a sure bet that such marine eruptions of methane have happened before and the Earth is still here, teeming with life. Whether or not Man would survive any such catastrophe is ultimately immaterial in the grand scheme of life. Dinosaurs were far more successful than we are, evolutionarily speaking, but even their reign came to an end. If our number is up, then it just is.

There are literally thousands of methane upwellings from marine permafrost all over the world. One that comes to mind is a fairly large one near Catalina Island, just off the California coast, that has been steadily emitting methane since before records were kept.

This is simply bored scientists rattling the alarm bells in the hopes of getting funding to fatten their wallets and research budgets. Global warming has been a bonanza for climatologists, who used to struggle for funding because they were seen as just overpaid weathermen, the type that give your local forecast on the evening news.

I believe it behooves us as a moral obligation to preserve our Earth, in as much as it is possible, without causing undue human suffering. Environmentalism has almost become a dirty word because of the scare-mongering and profiteering that has corrupted what used to be a worthy philosophy of living in balance with nature.

Keep it coming, Skybird! It's good that you care enough about our Earth to warn us that we must be mindful of how we live. I may not agree with the "junk science" but I do agree with reducing the careless waste of our industrialized consumer frenzy, which has plagued our world and our hearts.

If you say so, GP, if you say so.