EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
- Corporate Win: Supreme Court Says Monsanto Has 'Control Over Product of Life'
- Cornel West: Obama 'Is a War Criminal'
- Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy ‘Breakthrough’
- Disaster Capitalism Strikes as Hedge Funds Circle Near-Bankrupt Municipalities Like Vultures
- Ignoring Bee Crisis, EPA Greenlights New 'Highly Toxic' Pesticide
Popular content
Today's Top News
Huge Methane Leak in Arctic Ocean: Study
WASHINGTON - Methane is leaking into the atmosphere from unstable permafrost in the Arctic Ocean faster than scientists had thought and could worsen global warming, a study said Thursday.
A general view of the Artic Ocean in 2008. Methane is leaking into the atmosphere from unstable permafrost in the Arctic Ocean faster than scientists had thought and could worsen global warming, a study said Thursday. (AFP/File/Slim Allagui) From 2003 to 2008, an international research team led by University of Alaska-Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov surveyed the waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which covers more than 772,200 square miles (two million square kilometers) of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean.
"This discovery reveals a large but overlooked source of methane gas escaping from permafrost underwater, rather than on land," the study said.
"More widespread emissions could have dramatic effects on global warming in the future."
Earlier studies in Siberia had focused on methane escaping from thawing permafrost on land.
Scientists have long thought that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf acted as an impermeable barrier that sealed in methane, a powerful greenhouse gas 30 times more potent that carbon dioxide.
But the research team's observations showed that the permafrost submerged on the shelf is perforated and leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere.
More than 80 percent of the deep water and more than half of surface water had methane levels around eight times higher than found in normal seawater, according to the study published in the journal Science.
The researchers warned that the release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.
"Ocean-bottom permafrost contains vast amounts of carbon, and experts are concerned that its release as methane gas would lead to warmer atmospheric temperatures, thus creating a positive-feedback loop that would lead to more methane escaping from the permafrost and more global warming," they said.
Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, said Shakhova.
Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher, and scientists are concerned because the undersea permafrost "has been showing signs of destabilization already," she added.
"If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions... would be significantly larger."
Geological records indicate that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods.
- Posted in
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
89 Comments so far
Show Allwhere's kem patrick when you need him?...........
For an idea of what we're looking at with the release of the methane clathrates under the sea, google PETM (Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum) and be prepared to crap yourself. We're in for a doozy folks, brought to you by Government, Capitalism and the letters 'F' and 'U'.
but of course . . . first thing you get when you Google PETM is a frackin' stock quote for PetSmart.
That just about says it all, doesn't it?
I know, right? We are good and truly fucked. I'm sad for your and my children. We are going to leave them, in the words of the immortal Geo. Carlin, "A big, steaming ball of gaseous shit". May our descendants forgive us.
Yes but the earth will be fine!
Yep I concur, the Earth will be fine once all those parasitic humans are gone.
i tried yahoo and got the same thing, BUT, third on the list was an article by wikipedia on the real thing.........
and funnily enough on yahoo was a big article on this subject by reuters........
oh, oh, things are hotting up in the methane department.............
The PETM was just pocket change compared to what we are headed for - a re-enactment of the great Permin-Trassic extinction. Things died off so fast that there were explosion of populations of molds growing on the wood of the dead forests, and even animal carcasses. Oceans were reduced to an anoxic sulfurous stinking soup. Atmopheric O2 decreased to less than half of current values and life was possible at all only near sea level.
But the anaerobic bacteria loved it, and they will continue no matter what occurs. Life will continue, the atmosphere will stabilize, and evolution will continue, all with or without humans.
What's worse is that the widespread burning of fossil fuels - in this case widespread volcanism in Siberia burning large amounts of coal deposits - together with melting methane ice are implicated in the Permian-Triassic extinction event; that's doubly foreboding for our situation.
The coal plants are nothing short of a loaded gun aimed at most of life on earth.
Good point. It never occured to me that the Siberian traps volcanism/coal burning is is a natural analogue to what we are doing - probably on about the same time scale. There is also an abnormal amount of continental mass exposed above sea level, compared to the geologic norm, nowadays just like the days of Pangaea. Things are just right for another near-life ending mass extinction. But this experiment in bio-geoligical brinkmanship hs only been done once ot twice before, maybe life will never recover beyond bacteria and cockroaches this time.
Ultimately the denialists will be left with simply adopting that ultimate reducio-ad-nihilio-tautology that humans and their economic syatems are just natural phenmnena too, so the coming catastrophe is "natural" and to quit worrying amd enjoy your SUV trip to the mall.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Great. Just effing great. Methane from sea-based permafrost AND land based permafrost melt. At this rate billions of human beings will die later this century from global warming and over-population compounding and accelerating biodiversity super-extinctions on every continent. These are the top problems that confront all of humanity and the old political paradigm from communism to socialism to social democracy to weakly regulated capitalist-centrist democracy to fascist-lite Republicanism to fascism fail to honestly, energetically or imaginatively address any of them.
Gee and I could have anything to do with you driving your frickin' SUV every day?
Methane is leaking into the atmosphere from unstable permafrost in the Arctic Ocean faster than scientists had thought and could worsen global warming, a study said Thursday.
--------------------------------------------------
*COULD* worsen?!??? Either the author of that is bone-ignorant, or some Capitalist lackey edited it before publication.
Widespread methane release is the trigger that will kill all high-order life and turn Earth into another Venus.
Sorry, no definition for bone-ignorant in my new Oxford English Dictionary. Would you give me the name of your source? I'm so glad you suggested that I throw out my old dictionary. I feel so much better having taken your advice.
This is of course, just more evidence of the vast tree-hugger, anti-capitalist, rabid socialist scientific conspiracy headed by Al Gore... at least that is how this latest evidence of Climate Change will be portrayed by the Corporations and MSM.
We are in for a major methane 'Mega-fart' as one environmental reporter once observed. If we have a large enough one, most life, including humans, will be wiped out in the higher northern latitudes. And it could happen so fast and be so widespread that no meaningful evacuations could be attempted.
This is definitive hard evidence we have passed the tipping point. A 'smoking gun' if you will. Combine it with continued ice shelf losses in Antarctica, and you have a very worrisome glimpse into the future.
What we should be doing is preparing our populations for the inevitable disasters to come, by retuning to a slower, lower tech lifestyle with fewer fossil fuel inputs and petrochemical derived luxuries.
Realistically, what we will do instead is piss away our few remaining windows of escape in a futile effort to prop up the failed world economy.
"What we should be doing is preparing our populations for the inevitable disasters to come, by retuning to a slower, lower tech lifestyle with fewer fossil fuel inputs and petrochemical derived luxuries."
If only that were possible. The carbon cycle is not the only one we have disrupted. The nitrogen cycle has also been disrupted and a third of humanity depends upon petrochemical derived nitrogen for their food.
one of my favorite little arctic towns, Inuvik, in Canada's Northwest Territories, is looking at temps 20 degrees above normal averages in the next week or so...
I know...
I just read another denialist claim that "This has been the coldent winter on record". Even if this person was talking about the mid-atlantic US, it has not at all been abnormally cold. Snowy, but even with the effect of the heavy late snow cover, not cold. We don't see anything like the deep cold spells we used to see.
And in Pond Inlet, Inuvik, on far northern Baffin Island. It rained and was well above freezing this last Christmas. Normal temperatures are about -30F.
Kem is slugging it out on Mother Jones.....
This news item is scary, not that we haven't seen it coming. Our role is to work on changing government policy toward real conservation and replacement of fossil fuels.
Thanks for the update on Kem. I always wondered where he went.
His politics were pretty "moderate" - comparable to that Texas guy Thomas More/Henry VII, so he is probably more accepted to laberaloid Obamabot bucnch that reads MoJo anyway.
Scientists have been 'surprised' by the consequences of Polar Warming with such regularity over the last 15 years that you could set your watch by it. I routinely now just take anything they say about the region and double their estimated damage. As such, this reportage is very, very worrisome indeed. Those of us who believed in GW have been saying for years that its what we DON'T know about the earth-atmosphere system that is scary, not what we DO know. But, even by that measure, recent reportage on Arctic methane is beginning to scare the bejessus out of me. As others have said on this thread, no other GW consequence we've discovered so far goes nearly as far as methane release in potentially serving up an extinction event.
In Al Gores movie, An Inconvenient Truth, he is standing on a ladder showing the CO2 spiking, and not even mentioning the deadlier and more worrisome effect of methane, released out of the melting permafrost and bubbling out of the oceans...what he didn't touch on, if I remember correctly, was immediately after those other spikes, there followed an ice age...Even if it means our extinction as a species, I hope earth can continue to regenerate itself and it's life forms, and come up with better organisms that will protect her and each other, not like the wrong-thinking-action-being-ness that this round of creation has wrought.
The problem is that a major methane eruption kills off over 94% per cent of sea life. At least that's what happened 251 million years ago when we had the most important methane burp known. But that was before we had wasted the forests and the corals. Now, we may make it a hundred per center. We may not make it to an ice age.
Relax folks, the solution is quite simple: A major pandemic that kills 90% of homo sapiens. Are you listening Dr Bio-Chemist in the Pentagon?
Seriously, there have been many who have been aware of the problem of over-population and the ever-increasing competition for dwindling finite resources. If rapid climate change does not kill us, it will be the lack of fresh water. If not water, then it will be a nuclear winter from the wars waged over non-existent resources.
Some of us looked to AIDS as a possible solution, then ebola, then H1N1. The latest pathogen awaiting to explode is H1N5 which appears to have been remarkably dormant these past 5 years. This solution has been explored repeatedly by science-fiction writers and movie directors for decades. It really does need to come to pass.
The problems is not population. Capitalism requires, and dynamically creates the social conditions for, perpetual accelerating consumption regardless of population size.
If you never learn anything else about macroeconomics, you need to understand this.
I'd say you're right and wrong, PJ. Population *IS* the problem, but it's being driven by Capitalism's psychopathic greed. Get rid of Capitalism, and we can start getting rid of the population bomb, too. Without killing anyone.
Repro limits: 0.5 live birth per person, then snippety-snip. That or we get 80% (Lovelock's prediction, which seems optimistic) mortality.
Kyoto Protocol:
Global Warming is Inevitable if Rampant
U.S. Population Growth Continues
On December 11, 1997 at Kyoto, the world’s industrial nations pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, in order to promote sustainable development and reduce global warming.
The pact – agreed to by former President Bill Clinton but not ratified by the U.S. Senate – has been abandoned by the Bush administration.
The Kyoto accord will surely fail without U.S. participation.
The United States is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases; with 5% of the world’s population, it accounts for 25% of the world’s total emissions. That number is sure to rise as the U.S. population grows by millions of people each decade.
The demands of the U.S.’s immigration-driven population growth continue to overburden our environment. Fossil fuels required to run automobiles, heat homes and businesses, and power factories are responsible for about 98% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, 24% of methane emissions, and 18% of nitrous oxide emissions. Increased agriculture, deforestation, landfills, industrial production, and mining contribute a significant share of emissions as well. These problems increase as U.S. population grows.
Like every other environmental issue, global warming and subsequent climate changes cannot be resolved until population growth is reversed and stabilized at a sustainable level.
http://www.npg.org/pospapers/kyoto.html
You can say whatever you want, whatever you think, but you have not proposed any workable solutions (like all the other comments here). Appropriating blame has never solved a problem.
Reducing or eliminating fossil fuel use will not stop AGW, only slow temporarily. Nor will eliminating the animal protein industry. None of these short-term delay tactics will be enacted by every state on the planet. People, especially westerners, will not be convinced to live like luddites/Amish - people do not willingly give up their lifestyle. Abolishing capitalism/technology and implementing some sort of feudal socialism will not stop AGW, because human greed being what it is, there will always be a large group of people who will abrogate common decree.
We need solutions, not talk.
your list of reasons these solutions will fail is certainly not yours alone...
I, of course, advocate for the cessation of industry...I understand your position on that...I simply, hopefully, suggest that trying is still valid...
what is your favorite solution?
"what is your favorite solution?"
As a preamble, I am a scientist. When attempting to model new phenomenon, we accept the first hypothesis that comes along, no matter how outlandish it sounds. We quickly dump that hypothesis as data and better hypotheses emerge.
I hinted at a solution above, which is both extreme and repulsive, but in the absence of better ideas, I would rather see it tabled until a better idea emerges. This solution is based on the premises that man alone cannot solve the problem, that the solution should be imposed upon us, and that the solution is not selective by favoring one society over another. I suggested a highly virulent contagion. I'll stand by that until a more reasonable suggestion is offered, which I hope is very, very soon.
thank you...I will still hope for man rising to the occasion...
and, yes...very, very soon...
Are you nuts?
Your "final solution" sounds like something out the James Bond film "Moonraker". Well Drax, I strongly disagree with you. Engineering a contagion never works. It's just going to wind up making everybody miserable while failing to cull the population adequately. Mindless drones in the Pentagram are what got us into this mess, thank you very much, we don't need any more of their kind of help. Besides, the heat sink feature of the oceans means it's too late for that by itself. It might take 30 years for the effect to occur.
We need to consider blowing up a few volcanos to lower the worldwide temp. When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines went off in 1991, worldwide temps dropped considerably since it threw miles of reflective cubic ash into the high atmosphere. The Myon Volcano is currently erupting and perhaps can be exploded intentionally so that the Magma chamber below it will explode like Pinatubo did.
NGO Geologists are you listening?
The powerful eruption of such an enormous volume of lava and ash injected significant quantities of aerosols and dust into the stratosphere. Sulfur dioxide oxidised in the atmosphere to produce a haze of sulfuric acid droplets, which gradually spread throughout the stratosphere over the year following the eruption. The injection of aerosols into the stratosphere is thought to have been the largest since the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, with a total mass of SO2 of about 17 million tons being injected—the largest volume ever recorded by modern instruments (see chart and figure).
This very large stratospheric injection resulted in a reduction in the normal amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface by roughly 10% (see figure). This led to a decrease in northern hemisphere average temperatures of 0.5–0.6 °C (0.9–1.1 °F), and a global fall of about 0.4 °C (0.7 °F). At the same time, the temperature in the stratosphere rose to several degrees higher than normal, due to absorption of radiation by the aerosols. The stratospheric cloud from the eruption persisted in the atmosphere for three years after the eruption.
Satellite measurements of ash and aerosol emissions from Mount Pinatubo.
The eruption had a significant effect on ozone levels in the atmosphere, causing a large increase in the destruction rate of ozone. Ozone levels at mid-latitudes reached their lowest recorded levels, while in the southern hemisphere winter of 1992, the ozone hole over Antarctica reached its largest ever size until then, with the fastest recorded ozone depletion rates. The eruption of Mount Hudson in Chile in August 1991 also contributed to southern hemisphere ozone destruction, with measurements showing a sharp decrease in ozone levels at the tropopause when the aerosol clouds from Pinatubo and Hudson arrived.
Another noticeable effect of the dust in the atmosphere was the appearance of lunar eclipses. Normally even at mid-eclipse, the moon is still visible although much dimmed, but in the year following the Pinatubo eruption, the moon was hardly visible at all during eclipses, due to much greater absorption of sunlight by dust in the atmosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo
So blow up ten of these and we fall into a nice deep freeze of ten degrees F cooler than today. The only catch is that in three years all white people without pigment in their skin will likely die of skin cancer....
I guess the way we've been running the world we deserve it.
Better than spreading designer germ warfare on everybody.... but it still is crumby.
Ya know, now that I think about it, maybe you're right and this species isn't worth saving!
TJ
"Are you nuts?"
Probably. *shrug*
Asking a volcano (we would need many to have any real effect) to pop its top is a wee bit beyond our abilities. Source material for volcanoes exists between several and several hundreds of miles beneath our feet. I believe the French have the record for burying a nuke (I'm assuming this is your volcano trigger mechanism) at around 2,700'. I think our max depth achieved at Yucca Mtn is 1,800'. Having said that, I'm not convinced nukes could trigger an eruption, despite the best efforts of the sci-fi movies "Crack in the World" and the abysmal "Core" to convince us otherwise. But maybe we could pi$$ off the Sun into bombing us with neutrinos a la "2012".
Frivolity aside, manufacturing a contagion would be easier (ebola is an easy starting point), but I was really thinking about H1N5 naturally vectoring into a human virus.
deleted by author
Good WTF,
You're not nuts! ;)
I had you hunched over petri dishes in my mind, exclaiming "lives! lives!, There all mine!" (like Donald Rumsfield). You're right about H1N5 birdflu. It's getting unstable for some reason... But even scarier is the prospect of the robber barons releasing mutant small pox again. Naturally, only they will get the vaccine.
Yeah, not sure we know how to trigger volcanos.
No. I didn't mean use a nuke. That is pretty risky. The fallout might get everybody. Just use conventional oil drilling equipment at the base of one already erupting and drop conventional explosives down the hole when a typhoon comes by. I know that sounds strange, but the low pressure of a typhoon (hurricane) is what triggered Pinatubo. Believe it or not, we seem to have a lot of earthquakes during cyclonic weather also. I got thrown out of bed when intense rain filled up Pinatubo's Caldera four years after the big one, and the water seeped down into the hot magma below the volcano. The Mayon has been pumping red rivers of lava recently, so the magma chamber is already doing it's thing. Just up to us to figure out how to fire the gun. Twenty typhoons a year (20 hurricanes) gives us pretty good odds of a close enough passage.
There's a few more of these active ones in Indonesia that might work. Of course the catch is that it will wipe out the islanders and cave in everybody's rooftops... not sure they're going to thrilled with that plan... Might have to wait until the Greenland Ice Cap breaks up around 2050 and floods half their islands... Then maybe they'd let us do it, (but sorta too late; just like everything else we humans do is.)
What happens in 2012? Every Sixty Million Years our solar system pops out of the "sombrero hat" protection of our galaxy and suffers mass extinctions (goes the theory). The solar system has a crappy orbit of it's own apparently. Is it time for that again already?
Bummer.
You detail why the logical solutions won't be adopted, which is what I admit in my own comment, yet you still ask for solutions. AGW has already and will cause greater havoc, the degree of future havoc determined by the relative success of mitigation attempts, which you probably already know. Are you asking for solutions allowing adaptation and survival, or?
I remember learning that too, but how are we supposed to consume with maxed-out credit cards and no jobs??
What is with the conditionals? Coulds and woulds ought to be replaced by will, as in the first sentence, the methane--any methane--released WILL worsen global warming. Not mentioned is the fact that these small amounts of methane being released underwater will dilute prior to entering the atmosphere, but that is little comfort given the likelihood of further warming causing larger volumes to be released that will escape dilution.
Nothing short of a total, immediate halt of the global capitalist merry-go-round and usage of fossil fuels allows for any hope of mitigation. Since that won't be done, the best folks can do is create intentional communities and prepare for the worst. IMO, preparing for that worst is the best inheritance one can leave one's children.
Just get the people in Utah to pass a resolution to say it ain't so and forget about it.
The melting of the ice is further sped up by the rampant use of chemtrails pulling the artic air (which acts as a blanket to keep the arctic ice cold and intact) into the lower 48 to cool an moisturize them, us; propagating the Faux Noise line, "See how cold it is? See how much snow? Global Warming is a hoax". Do we really have to forgive them because they DO know what they are doing? Owning the weather20/20.
Uh, I'm not sure what the hell you're talking about with chemtrails and all but, the unusual snowfall in the Eastern U.S. is easily explained by the fact that warmer air increases evaporation. More water in the air = More and heavier rainfall/snowfall. GW predicts that precipitation will be heavier and more frequent due to increased evaporation of water into the atmosphere. I bemoan the lack of a decent science/math curriculum in American schools.
I think its also related to this year being an 'El Nino' year. American's have short memories.
"Uh, I'm not sure what the hell you're talking about with chemtrails and all ... "
You don't look up at the sky much do you?
Of course I do, smart ass. It's just that I don't buy into bullshit conspiracy theories about 'chemtrails' and junk like that. Even if they were spraying chemicals from every plane that flies over, what bit of difference does that make when our water, food and damn nearly everything else is poisoned, even before they do the spraying? I'm just saying that in the scheme of things, it's one of those things that I worry nothing about.
The Return of the Great Northern Gas-Ball of Doom!
It's like old times here on CD.
Kem Patrick nostalgia as well,... so sweet!
If anyone remembers -or cares- my opinion is that the actual methane gas release looks to be really significant, but even so, I'm not convinced that these total doom scenarios that we seem to constantly spin from this are either certain or helpful.
We can't convince the tens of millions of people in this country who are LOOKING FORWARD to the Apocalypse that they should change they're behavior to avoid it any more than we can punish children by promising them ice cream after dinner.
-matti.
we are in very strange and dangerous times...while this article is focusing on the climate, others focus on the decline of personal freedoms, and the escalation of the surveillance state...we certainly don't want to ignore the rise of the drones...
as I watch my fellow humans prepare the infrastructure for what appears to me to be not-too-distant total world domination, I try to imagine what might stop them...
my first, best hope is the unanimous reaction of the world's citizens...this would, theoretically, allow for both issues, climate and domination, to be addressed simultaneously...
if that doesn't happen, my next hope is catastrophic climate change...
that might explain why some of us are dramatic where climate is concerned...it might help us avoid much worse...but only if big weather-related things start happening quickly, because those hungering for the world's throne are not waiting...they are working, even now...killing and poisoning and planning their moves in light of the rebellion that I am sure they fully anticipate...
I haven't even touched upon the chemical impact of our ongoing industrial practices, but, in my opinion, these, too, are life threatening, and must cease...
proactively or reactively, change is coming...I'm hoping we can be proactive...
You have no idea how right you are! The last 30yrs + the Obummer,, Who wants to live!
Welcomeing 2012 :)
I'll just pass on that life jacket.
This is a huge problem.
I do not think that there is an easy solution because what is being felt today is related to what went into the atmosphere 30 YEARS AGO!!
Here in Hawaii we are having such a bad drought that large trees are falling over.
And it will escalate at an increasing speed.
My husband is a conservation biologist and we have been aware of these problems for about 20 years now.
It has been a difficult road for us to watch all the dominoes fall and feel like chicken little..with no one listening.
Now we are all in the same boat and I can only hope that once everyone gets the big picture they will stop driving their cars.
It's going to be a challenge for everyone and probably will get pretty ugly.
In the meantime I just try to be happy and enjoy my family and friends.
Blessings to us all
Birdie