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Climate Trouble May Be Bubbling Up in Far North
MACKENZIE RIVER DELTA, Northwest Territories — Only a squawk from a sandhill crane broke the Arctic silence — and a low gurgle of bubbles, a watery whisper of trouble repeated in countless spots around the polar world.
"On a calm day, you can see 20 or more `seeps' out
across this lake," said Canadian researcher Rob Bowen, sidling his
small rubber boat up beside one of them. A tossed match would have set
it ablaze.
"It's essentially pure methane."
Pure methane, gas bubbling up from underwater vents, escaping into northern skies, adds to the global-warming gases accumulating in the atmosphere. And pure methane escaping in the massive amounts known to be locked in the Arctic permafrost and seabed would spell a climate catastrophe.
Is such an unlocking under way?
Researchers say air temperatures here in northwest Canada, in Siberia and elsewhere in the Arctic have risen more than 2.5 C (4.5 F) since 1970 — much faster than the global average. The summer thaw is reaching deeper into frozen soil, at a rate of 4 centimeters (1.5 inches) a year, and a further 7 C (13 F) temperature rise is possible this century, says the authoritative, U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In 2007, air monitors detected a rise in methane concentrations in the atmosphere, apparently from far northern sources. Russian researchers in Siberia expressed alarm, warning of a potential surge in the powerful greenhouse gas, additional warming of several degrees, and unpredictable consequences for Earth's climate.
Others say massive seeps of methane might take centuries. But the Russian scenario is disturbing enough to have led six U.S. national laboratories last year to launch a joint investigation of rapid methane release. And IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri in July asked his scientific network to focus on "abrupt, irreversible climate change" from thawing permafrost.
The data will come from teams like one led by Scott Dallimore, who with Bowen and others pitched tents here on the remote, boggy fringe of North America, 2,200 kilometers (1,400 miles) from the North Pole, to learn more about seeps in the 25,000 lakes of this vast river delta.
A "puzzle," Dallimore calls it.
"Many factors are poorly studied, so we're really doing frontier science here," the Geological Survey of Canada scientist said. "There is a very large storehouse of greenhouse gases within the permafrost, and if that storehouse of greenhouse gases is fluxing to the surface, that's important to know. And it's important to know if that flux will change with time."
Permafrost, tundra soil frozen year-round and covering almost one-fifth of Earth's land surface, runs anywhere from 50 to 600 meters (160 to 2,000 feet) deep in this region. Entombed in that freezer is carbon — plant and animal matter accumulated through millennia.
As the soil thaws, these ancient deposits finally decompose, attacked by microbes, producing carbon dioxide and — if in water — methane. Both are greenhouse gases, but methane is many times more powerful in warming the atmosphere.
Researchers led by the University of Florida's Ted Schuur last year calculated that the top 3 meters (10 feet) of permafrost alone contain more carbon than is currently in the atmosphere.
"It's safe to say the surface permafrost, 3 to 5 meters, is at risk of thawing in the next 100 years," Schuur said by telephone from an Alaska research site. "It can't stay intact."
Methane also is present in another form, as hydrates — ice-like formations deep underground and under the seabed in which methane molecules are trapped within crystals of frozen water. If warmed, the methane will escape.
Dallimore, who has long researched hydrates as energy sources, believes a breakdown of such huge undersea formations may have produced conical "hills" found offshore in the Beaufort Sea bed, some of them 40 meters (more than 100 feet) high.
With underwater robots, he detected methane gas leaking from these seabed features, which resemble the strange hills ashore here that the Inuvialuit, or Eskimos, call "pingos." And because the coastal plain is subsiding and seas are rising from warming, more permafrost is being inundated, exposed to water warmer than the air.
The methane seeps that the Canadians were studying in the Mackenzie Delta, amid grassy islands, steel-gray lakes and summertime temperatures well above freezing, are saucer-like indentations just 10 meters (30 feet) or so down on the lake bed.
The ultimate source of that gas — hydrates, decomposition or older natural gas deposits — is unclear, but Dallimore's immediate goal is quantifying the known emissions and finding the unknown.
With tent-like, instrument-laden enclosures they positioned over two seeps, each several meters (yards) wide, the researchers have determined they are emitting methane at a rate of up to 0.6 cubic meters (almost 1 cubic yard) per minute.
Dallimore's team is also monitoring the seeps with underwater listening devices, to assess whether seasonal change — warming — affects the emissions rate.
Even if the lake seeps are centuries old, Bowen said, the question is, "Will they be accelerated by recent changes?"
A second question: Are more seeps developing?
To begin answering that, Dallimore is working with German and Canadian specialists in aerial surveying, teams that will fly over swaths of Arctic terrain to detect methane "hot spots" via spectrometric imagery, instruments identifying chemicals by their signatures on the light spectrum.
Research crews are hard at work elsewhere, too, to get a handle on this possible planetary threat.
"I and others are trying to take field observations and get it scaled up to global models," said Alaska researcher Schuur. From some 400 boreholes drilled deep into the tundra worldwide, "we see historic warming of permafrost. Much of it is now around 2 below zero (28 F)," Schuur said.
A Coast Guard C-130 aircraft is overflying Alaska this summer with instruments sampling the air for methane and carbon dioxide. In parts of Alaska, scientists believe the number of "thermokarst" lakes — formed when terrain collapses over thawing permafrost and fills with meltwater — may have doubled in the past three decades. Those lakes then expand, thawing more permafrost on their edges, exposing more carbon.
Off Norway's Arctic archipelago of Svalbard last September, British scientists reported finding 250 methane plumes rising from the shallow seabed. They're probably old, scientists said, but only further research can assess whether they're stable. In March, Norwegian officials did say methane levels had risen on Svalbard.
Afloat above the huge, shallow continental shelf north of Siberia, Russian researchers have detected seabed "methane chimneys" sending gas bubbling up to the surface, possibly from hydrates.
Reporting to the European Geophysical Union last year, the scientists, affiliated with the University of Alaska and the Russian Academy of Sciences, cited "extreme" saturation of methane in surface waters and in the air above. They said up to 10 percent of the undersea permafrost area had melted, and it was "highly possible" that this would open the way to abrupt release of an estimated 50 billion tons of methane.
Depending on how much dissolved in the sea, that might multiply methane in the atmosphere several-fold, boosting temperatures enough to cause "catastrophic greenhouse warming," as the Russians called it. It would be self-perpetuating, melting more permafrost, emitting more methane.
Some might label that alarmism. And Stockholm University researcher Orjan Gustafsson, a partner in the Russians' field work, acknowledged that "the scientific community is quite split on how fast the permafrost can thaw."
But there's no doubt the north contains enough potential methane and carbon dioxide to cause abrupt climate change, Gustafsson said by telephone from Sweden.
Canada's pre-eminent permafrost expert, Chris Burn, has trekked to lonely locations in these high latitudes for almost three decades, meticulously chronicling the changes in the tundra.
On a stopover at the Aurora Research Institute in the Mackenzie Delta town of Inuvik, the Carleton University scientist agreed "we need many, many more field observations." But his teams have found the frozen ground warming down to about 80 meters, and he believes the world is courting disaster in failing to curb warming by curbing greenhouse emissions.
"If we lost just 1 percent of the carbon in permafrost today, we'd be close to a year's contributions from industrial sources," he said. "I don't think policymakers have woken up to this. It's not in their risk assessments."
How likely is a major release?
"I don't think it's a case of likelihood," he said. "I think we are playing with fire."
- Posted in
29 Comments so far
Show Allone of the fascinating geographic realities of western washington state is the ice-age Lake Missoula...a vast lake of melt would form up around the canada\us border, behind an increasingly inadequate ice dam, which would break, and the lake would empty in an unbelievably rapid, and enormous, flood across the region that carved out the coulees and the old Columbia river bed, including Dry Falls, a feature that would have dwarfed Niagara...the process repeated more than once...
the point is: huge amounts of energy can be released rapidly if the withholding forces give way...
Following on from dubet's point, if I don't get a chance to post again. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
"WOOPS, MY BAD" says humanity.
Maybe this explains why we never find the logical signals, like radio or laser coming from another civilization in the millions of planets that exist in our neck of the Universe.
Maybe every time life gets to understanding the bigger neighborhood, it destroys itself before it can become spacefaring. Compared to 90 percent of other solar systems, ours is ridiculously stable without perturbing orbits of rouge bodies and objects that would spell doom for anything trying to evolve.
Since we are shackled with the curse of mindless religion and war, we cannot fathom a world of small numbers of humans, where this runaway heat rise would not have happened for many thousands of years in the future.
Now it's accelerated in our short individual lifetime to the point of no return.
A veritable Planet of the Bush Apes if you like.
2050's going to be ugly. The odds of the Greenland Ice Cap holding up till then are remote. That's a 20 foot sea rise right there. All the computer models assumed a three degree rise in temperature over 100 years. We've already seen a 4.5 degree rise this year in that latitude but the oil companies, who own many of the weather stations know it's not in their best interest to report what's really cooking up there.
I honestly don't know what's going to get us first. Probably a slow torture of not being able to breathe due to worldwide Coal flyash fallout (happening already) and lack of oxygen due to no rain-forests or plankton left (the lungs of the planet).
But it's clear Preditory Capitalism doesn't care about humans under 45, otherwise we'd already be substituting dirty coal for rooftop residential solar, and limiting the population.
So, nothing as sexy as an Armageddon Asteroid coming to smash us; just slow individual suffocation followed by extinction for Homo sapien, the supposed "Man of Wisdom". What a sick joke that species name was, huh?
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
I would go with the western side of the Greenland Ice Sheet being undermined by warm sea water. Also the Pine Island / West Antarctic ice sheet and a chunk of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet are equally vulnerable to warm sea water, a strong heat conductor. Just a 50% guess because I'm not a scientist with a job to lose and Exxon/Republicans to please, but how about a 30 foot ocean rise by 2050, most of it in the 2030-2050 decades?
Excellent Guess PaulK,
Google Earth has "layers" that can be activated with data balloons on the Jakobshavn glacier that is racing for the sea. It appears it may be pulling the ice cap down with it (GPS movement stake reports.) Huge blue "Moulins" are visable certain times of the year that flow on the scale of Niagara Falls.
While not a scientist either, I flew over Greenland as a pilot frequently in the 80's. I have a few great pictures of it when it was frozen solid. Usually it was dark or obscured by bad weather when we did our crossings in the "Polar Track System" from Europe to Anchorage, AK, but sometimes you could see just how completely frozen the area was in winter. Now I gather that solid ice pack we used to see is no more most of the year.
My understanding of weather is that the oceans are giant "heat sinks" that once warmed, stay hot just like dishes coming out of a dishwasher. Even if you turn the dishwasher off, the plates are red hot for some time, and cannot be touched. The big question of course, is how long it takes these giant ocean "plates" to radiate excess heat into space. I have read opinions from ten to fifty years; so I just picked thirty years as a likely point of the temperature rise stopping. That's if every auxiliary source of heat (every engine, every solar flare) is turned completely off, the worldwide temp will likely rise for another thirty years. All a guess on my part.
In Aviation, you have to assume bad things are going to happen, and then be pleasantly surprised when they don't. In Science, it seems it's the other way around. You have to model your prediction to undershoot what you think is going to happen to avoid being discredited.
It appears to me the "climate deniers" are going to go extinct first. Next will be Republican Vacationers who own homes with docks in Florida. Last will be the gecko and the cockroach, followed by the kind of bacteria found in 2000 degree sea-floor hydra vents, and inside the walls of nuclear reactors.
Ah, Mr. Darwin, you and your Galapagos Finches were right all along. Evolution is in the drivers seat, and is not done with us yet.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
"extinction for Homo sapien, the supposed "Man of Wisdom". What a sick joke that species name was, huh?"
'Homo Cleverass' is more like it, heh?
You know how the Obama family watched Old Faithful erupt in Yellowstone Park? Well, that's how the space aliens feel about humanity triggering the biggest methane release in 100 million years. It's one thing to see the pictures, but if you can be present for the event it's really worth the trip! OOOOHHH!!
The local wildlife is fun to watch, too, in their colorful blue maxi-skirts and plaid shirts. Do not feed, they might bite!
Canada's pre-eminent permafrost expert, Chris Burn, has trekked to lonely locations in these high latitudes for almost three decades, meticulously chronicling the changes in the tundra.
_____________________________________
Please tell me that Chris Burn's nickname is "Freezer"!
· Yr Obd't Servant
So what would happen if there was a massive 'once every 100 000 year' methane fart?
Well, for one, every living thing north of about oh, London, England would be dead in a matter of days. Every man, woman and child in Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Iceland, Scotland, most of Russia, a large part of China and almost all of Northern Canada. Alaska would be among the first to go.
Goodbye Caribou Barbie AKA Sarah 'I can see Russia from my back yard.' Plain. Good riddance.
A death toll in the hundreds of millions.
Not to mention the almost immediate havoc wreaked by the methane jumping the global thermostat into 'Hell on Earth' for the rest of the planet.
But hey, you can buy a Prius!
Walk in peace.
I say set that methane ablaze and let it burn as not setting it ablaze will allow all that methane into the atmosphere to fester and create a slower way to die, besides it will just be a 'near extinction level event' theoretically culling the stupid human population down to MAYBE an environmentally sustainable level.
Even if you were able to burn all the methane that's being released you'd still be warming the planet by producing hundreds of millions of tons of CO2. But you'd never be able to burn it all...
If we're very lucky, very very lucky, this winter will see a whole bunch of volcanos pumping hundreds of tons of ash into the upper atmosphere. Say the equivalant of 3-4 Krakatoas, that amount of ash should be able to cool the planet. Otherwise, there will be a nuke war that will create a nuke winter, we might be able to survive that. Personally, I think we're all pooched, there is no way the industrialists are going to limit the polution that their industries generate.
Oh, excuse me, but I don't recall saying to burn ALL the methane as the oxygen depletion of such a burn would prevent total conbustable consumption and 3 or 4 or 7 krakatoas would not equal even the 1 Tambora eruption in 1815 but as it stands now with the mentality incharge of the nuclear arsenals, I go with nuclear inhillation(sp) as the severe disruption of planet earth, I mean how else would greedy csmfing corporatists act when confronted with their not having control they have enjoyed the past few centuries.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A781715
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PLATETEC/TOPTEN.HTM
[samosamo August 31st, 2009 11:45 pm
I say set that methane ablaze and let it burn ]
Sorry, I misunderstood you... (grin) My post above was a bit fatalistic. I don't think we'll be nuking each other in a bid to save ourselves, or if we did it'd already be too late. I mentioned the volcano idea as it might cool the planet, but doubt that the planet is going to be so obliging to us. I think there is little if anything that can be done to prevent the ecosystem from giving us humans quite a nasty shock.
No, not much can be done and to try and not let it bother me as much, I have read up on the whole phenomenon of the ice ages and I believe the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) is as good a source of reference as any to understand what climate change is and how the 'human footprint' is effecting things:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ctl/100k.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/milankovitch.html
and a list to pick from
http://usasearch.gov/search?affiliate=noaa.gov&v%3Aproject=firstgov&query=ice+age+cycles&x=0&y=0
I live in the north, 53'34", we used to have predictable seasons as little as 15 years ago. By this time the temp would be dropping down to the low 20s C, today the temp is between 25-29C which is a heck of a lot warmer than it normally was. Our winters are far warmer than they've ever been, yet the tory's and the climate change deniers claim there's no problem. If you ignore the evidence and don't read about the topic, then yah, no problem. I don't remember the exact last time the temp hit -40C here in Edmonton, but it was over a decade ago. Funny how you can miss something that you really hated when younger, I used to love the idea of moving somewhere where there was no harsh winter. Never thought that the harsh winter would be the thing that moved...
I understand and sympathize, I have a liking for the cooler weather/climate but until last winter it had not snowed here in 8 years and then got 1/2 inch and it was gone in a couple of hours and for the last several years, maybe 3 or 4, the day time high never got to freezing, and I am a few degrees lower in latitude but I have seen 4" and 8" snows around here.
But the big tell tale is the melting of the glaciers every where and I say only warmer weather can do that no matter the cause or source.
[But the big tell tale is the melting of the glaciers every where and I say only warmer weather can do that no matter the cause or source.]
No doubt. My cousin works for Parks Canada, he goes up to Ellesmere Island every winter to the most northerly park on earth to work. He tells us of how much the glaciers up there have shrunk in the last few years, not a happy story.
Maybe someone can figure out a way to capture this methane and use it as fuel. It probably burns cleaner than coal.
Here is a site of interest to those who may wish to err on the side of the continuance of life on Earth: www.planetextinction.com.
It has relevance to the above article re: clathrates.
Also, here is an interesting relevant side observation from The Daily Galaxy:
"BIOCIDE is occurring at an alarming rate. Experts say that at least HALF of the world’s current species will be COMPLETELY GONE by the end of the century. Wild plant-life is also disappearing. Most biologists say that we are IN THE MIDST OF AN ANTHROPOGENIC MASS EXTINCTION.
Numerous scientific studies confirm that this phenomenon is real and happening right now. Should anyone really care? Will it impact individuals on a personal level? Scientists say, “Yes!”
Critics argue that species disappear and new ones emerge all the time. That’s true, IF you’re speaking in terms of millennia. Scientists acknowledge that species disappear at an estimated rate of one species per million per year, with new species replacing the lost ones at around the same rate.
BUT recently HUMANS have accelerated the extinction rate to where several ENTIRE species are ANNIHILATED EVERY SINGLE DAY.
The death toll artificially caused by humans is mind-boggling. Nature will take millions of years to repair what we destroy in just a few decades."
Great job, Earthlings!
And what about that earthling that said, "God said take it, rape it, it's yours," that baboon calling itself anncoulter? I guess you all are guided by its howlings, and those of all the other baboons in that one's troupe.
Now for an encore, start killing your kids... oh that's right, you are!
its estimated that the extinction rate is 31 species per day. thats about 18,000 so far this year.
Seriously? That is despicable, on the same plane as mountain destruction for "fuel.."
but wait guys.............
there's a faint glimmer of hope here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061019100814.htm
some interesting articles about 'methane devourers' and 'fuel' from methane..........
(personally i think they/we are clutching at straws!!!).....
a case of 'too little, too late'..................
KEM Patrick, if you're still reading CD, you are entitled to say "I %^&*ing TOLD you so!"
-------------------------------------------------------
If you don't ask yourself why, you know nothing.
Hello Kem Patrick. Oh Prophet, please give us a sign you are still here. All kidding aside, I appreciate the way you told the truth.
Joe
Don't worry. We have been hearing this for decades. Nothing will happen. Go shopping. Have an extra beer with lunch today. If you are not sleepy when you get home take a pill.
In an eon to come a more sapient species discovers remnants of extinct human culture. They research the evidence to determine what happened to that ancient race and discover that, despite many options, advantages and warnings, humankind expired because of two persistent habits:
1. They put assholes in charge.
2. They crapped where they ate.
####
I don't know what to say. There has been a lot going on in my life lately-all negative in the money realm. Can't make it stretch enough to pay for the basics. I've been in such a bad mood lately, I don't even feel like working... It takes money for me to go to work. My car insurance is too high, I have to pay for health insurance, gas is too much because the job is so far...
I have begun to make a move to do something different in the work area. I feel like I'm only contributing to the climate problem because of driving to work and by not being able to focus on making enough changes in general. Like my garden. I haven't been able to harvest and then preserve the food like I wanted to. I give some away and try to eat up the rest. What about winter. I may have to live on my Kale... I love my house and garden, the ability to greow my own food. But there are times now when I think we were suppose to stay hunter gatherers.
I read in my Sage Woman magazine about the era when humanity lived by a matriarchy, not patriarchy. I'd like to think we could come up with a new "archy". WE probably will but we won't be here for it... it will happen over a very long time, after most of this crop of humans has gone by the way side of climate catastrophe. Those that are left will develop a new way of life and will have love and caring as the central focus.
I have been posting a lot of personal anguish on this site lately. That's because I'm loosing hope. On my drives to work on the high way, I have a lot of time to think. It won't be long before some of these major climate changes, disruptions take hold. It'll be like a punch in the gut for some people. They won't know what hit them. I personally don't think we'll have to wait till 2030 0r 2050. Try maybe 5. It'll be bad enough .... and then there's 2012!!!
just know that when the chips fall at least you, me and others here will know what is happening and won't be taken by surprise. and therefore will probably have some idea of how to deal with it. i lost hope on humanity a long time ago. but i still have a life of my own to live. i do the best i can to help even though i know it's futile. and like you i don't think we are talking 2030/2050............