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Strong Methane Emissions On the Siberian Shelf
rrohbeck writes "The Independent reports brand-new results of high concentrations of methane — 100x normal — above the sea surface over the Siberian continental shelf. A large number of methane plumes have been discovered bubbling up from the sea floor. This is probably due to methane clathrate, buried under the sea floor before the last ice age, breaking up as higher water temperatures melt the permafrost that had contained it."
So this is how the world ends. Not with a bang but with a flatulent belch of ancient methane.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
"probably warmer water"... Yeah, nothing to do with the fact we're sitting on a huge fucking lump of molten rock and metal.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Alright, who farted a few hundred thousand years ago?
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Luckily the methane emissions won't cause further warming. Hurray!
"The right to do something does not mean doing it is right." William Safire
Could this be used to drive electric plants? Is it recoverable? Anyone have a match? A really fucking big match?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
By a factor of 27 or so. That's why effluent processing plants will burn the stuff off (apart from the fact it gives them some power).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Let's look at this for a few decades and see if it's really happening.
So, what happens if lightning strikes over one of these plumes?
Learn about Photography Basics.
We're advising all our customers to put everything they have into canned foods and shotguns.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
This is what it would be like, if the majority of people were athiests.
ATHIEST KID: Mom, I'm going to go fuck a hooker.
ATHIEST MOM: Okay, son.
ATHIEST KID: Afterwards, I'm going to go smoke pot with my friends, since it's "not addictive."
ATHIEST MOM: Okay, come home soon!
The athiest kid leaves the room. The father comes home from work several minutes later.
ATHIEST DAD: Hey!
ATHIEST MOM: Hi, honey! I'm pregnant again. I guess I'll just get another abortion, since "fetuses don't count as human life."
ATHIEST DAD: Okay, get as many abortions as you want!
ATHIEST MOM: Oh, and don't go in the bedroom.
ATHIEST DAD: Why not?
ATHIEST MOM: There are two gay men fucking eachother in there.
ATHIEST DAD: Why are they here?
ATHIEST MOM: I wanted to watch them do it for awhile. They just aren't finished yet.
ATHIEST DAD: Okay, that's fine with me!
Suddenly, their neighbor runs into the house.
ATHIEST NEIGHBOR: Come quick, there's a Christian outside!
ATHIEST MOM: We'll be right there!
The athiest couple quickly put on a pair of black robes and hoods. They then exit the house, and run into the street, where a Christian is nailed to a large, wooden X. He is being burned alive. A crowd of athiests stand around him, all wearing black robes and hoods.
RANDOM ATHIEST: Damn you, Christian! We hate you! We claim to be tolerant of all religions. But we really hate your's! That's because we athiests are hypocritical like that! Die, Christian!
THE END
Scary, isn't it?
we aren't currently getting the warmest temperatures of this century, so why has it just started now??
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
"I fart in your general direction!"
Love,
Siberian Shelf
Methane has an atmospheric half-life of about 7 years (turning into CO2 and water), fairly independent of any biosphere.
CO2 has an atmospheric half-life of somewhere between 50-100 years, with some nasty feedback (more CO2 = higher temperatures = longer half life).
So, per-volume, methane is worse, but what's gonna get us is the CO2 because that hangs around much longer and has the positive feedback.
Of course water is warmer... since the last glacial period... since the Little Ice Age... Oh, but recently oceans and atmosphere have been cooling. Well, there's still that free gas available at the moment - got a funnel and some pipe?
A large number of methane plumes have been discovered bubbling up from the sea floor over the Siberian continental shelf.
In other news, the Russian Navy announced a successful test of a submarine powered by a brand new propulsion system. The exact details are still classified, but sources claim there is a mysterious link between it and a new food and beverage contract awarded by the Navy to Taco Bell
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
but let's just hope it doesn't follow through.
Damnit. Kids these days.
In my day we were happy sniffing our own farts the old fashioned way- but no, that wasn't good enough. These days everyone is into their damn methane ice.
Who thinks this stuff up?
--Q
We're sooo totally fucked now!
> You do know that the depths of the ocean tend to be very cold, right?
Normally..... unless there is volcanic activity in the region like is currently going on around the north pole.
Study finds Arctic seabed afire with lava-spewing volcanoes:canada.com
But oh no, it just has to be global warming. It get shot somewhere: Global Warming! Record cold? That's Global Climate Change for ya. Floods? Drought? Plague of Locusts? Manmade Global Warming every time and the ONLY solution is the destruction of Western Civilization, replacing the values of the Enlightenment with Socialism and Planning.
Democrat delenda est
People have been expecting these Methane clouds:
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5j3U0vEk53bVXHIcGUqqO64rvDAUg
"Melting of methane ice unleashed runaway global warming some 635 million years ago, according to a study released Wednesday that has implications for today's climate-change crisis.
Release of the potent greenhouse-gas, at first in small amounts and then in massive volumes, brought a sudden end to the planet's longest Ice Age, its authors believe.
During the "Snowball Earth" era, Earth froze over completely, with glaciers that crept down into the tropics and possibly even reached the equator."
The Hives: Hate to Say I told You So:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsm2hSKkH7E
In Soviet Russia... the outdoors farts on you.
-David
Actually humanity dies from lighting the fart. Consider what Professor Gregory Ryskin wrote:
"The consequences of a methane-driven oceanic eruption for marine and terrestrial life are likely to be catastrophic. Figuratively speaking, the erupting region "boils over," ejecting a large amount of methane and other gases (e.g., CO2, H2S) into the atmosphere, and flooding large areas of land. Whereas pure methane is lighter than air, methane loaded with water droplets is much heavier, and thus spreads over the land, mixing with air in the process (and losing water as rain). The air-methane mixture is explosive at methane concentrations between 5% and 15%; as such mixtures form in different locations near the ground and are ignited by lightning, explosions and conflagrations destroy most of the terrestrial life, and also produce great amounts of smoke and of carbon dioxide. Firestorms carry smoke and dust into the upper atmosphere, where they may remain for several years; the resulting darkness and global cooling may provide an additional kill mechanism. Conversely, carbon dioxide and the remaining methane create the greenhouse effect, which may lead to global warming. The outcome of the competition between the cooling and the warming tendencies is difficult to predict."
You can see there's no real need to worry about global warming. If the "explosions and conflagrations" don't get you, the smoke and dust might cause global cooling. Or global warming, it could go either way. But the methane explosions are predicted to be the biggest killer.
So Michael Poole needs to get on this pronto.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2088
"The release of massive clouds of methane from icy hydrates buried under shallow ocean floors is the leading suspect for the most devastating extinction in the fossil record, according to a new analysis.
Methane best matches the unusual carbon-isotope fingerprints found at the scene of the crime, says Robert Berner of Yale University in Connecticut, US, though it cannot explain atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at the time.
Berner says: "It's possible that you could have a combination" of effects causing the mass extinction that ended the Permian period, 250 million years ago. The event wiped out the vast majority of marine species and left Europe a near-desert."
Oh shi...
Ok, so if methane caused runaway warming 635 million years ago, and we're experience global warming now, then man-made global warming may be a myth after all.
Come on "scientists", can we get at least one thing from you that isn't yet another "PANIC!" report?
Just imagine if programmers started writing code this recklessly!
"Of course water is warmer... since the last glacial period... since the Little Ice Age... Oh, but recently oceans and atmosphere have been cooling."
How is this bullshit insightfull?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The mass extinction at the end of the Permian has been attributed to numerous causes. One of the prime theories also has to do with rapid release of methyl hydrates from ocean-floor clathrates.
The theory goes along the lines that oceanic overturning (exchange of bottom waters with surface waters) was limited in the Permian (even after the end of the Permo-Carboniferous glacial period), allowing accumulation of clathrates in oceanic sediments. However, overturning increased in the late Permian due to changes in oceanic circulation. This is conjectured to have caused massive releases of methane from methyl hydrates, with consequent large rapid swings in climate on land and in sea.
The evidence is not conclusive, but is strong. Most of it is derived from studies of marine fossils and isotope ratios. Discussion of the evidence and assessment of this and other theories for the extinction may be found, for example, in:
D.H. Erwin, The Great Paleozoic Crisis: Life and Death in the Permian, Columbia University Press, New York NY, 1993. ISBN:0715301306.
Of course, oceanic overturning is much stronger in the modern world, with deepwater formation especially strong in the North Atlantic and at the margins of Antarctica. This suggests the potential for clathrate release is probably rather less than it was in the late Permian, but not necessarily negligible. Another conjectured effect of global warming is slowing of oceanic overturning
The degree to which evidence supports these conjectures regarding ancient disruptions to climate is open to interpretation.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Seeing as there is no way we can really stop this build up of methane from escaping at this point, we should be finding a way to capture and process it to reuse it.
Read the book the swarm this shit aint funny the book was fiction but it got all of its science from this shit and its pretty solid, and can show easily how bad this can get and how fast.
If that's the worst thing going on in Siberia that's good for them.
It does touch on a point I've wondered about: religion seems to be the foundation of much of our societal moral code. Without the framework of religion, why is it "wrong" to kill someone?
Reminds me of thing Nietzsche wrote about the madman in the market place, "now that we've killed God, which way is up or down?" This is known as the question of 'grounding' and is the subject of much debate in the study of ethics.
Religion does provide one ground. It is perhaps most effective because it relies on blind obedience and discourages thinking. "What is wrong with murder ... easy ... God says don't do it." But other grounds, more suitable to thinking creatures do exist. Kant's categorical imperative, for example, "Want to live in a world where every person tries kill every other? No? Then don't kill."
Putting aside the question of grounding, it is my contention that a Christian cannot appreciate the true gravity of murder in the way an atheist can. Christians have convinced themselves in the existence of an afterlife. For them killing a human is merely removing them from this world (the less important world). An atheist on the other hand realises that killing a human being is the snuffing out of an individual and unique consciousness for all time. A consciousness which longs for existence, just as much as our own does. It is this moral consideration which stops the atheist killing. Theists instead act only in obedience to their God motivated by ultimate personal reward. You might go even further and state that whereas atheists can truly be moral creatures, theists can't.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Yes! Screw you government! I haven't yet filed a tax return for last year, and there's nothing you can do about it, because we'll all be dead.
*evil cackle* I win again! Oh, wait ...
...along with electricity and thus, computer culture.
So...how do I go about overclocking a shotgun?
Perhaps time to scale up from my desktop trebuchet to a real one?
To be honest, I was really hoping for a *zombie* type apocalypse, but oh well.
This could well be a possible explanation for the 1908 Tunguska blast in Siberia.
The event still remains an unsolved mystery, despite many theories put forward to explain it.
One of the possible explanations is that it was caused by high concentrations of methane accumulated from the crust, followed by explosive combustion.
It seems every day something else is going to kill us all.
Well, several theories suggest heating of the earth will stop the gulfstream and push earth in a new ice age.. better start downloading some extra porn for those cold long nights...
And the rate at which change is happening is unprecedented.
I'm not really arguing with you, but 'unprecedented' is relative what slice of time you look at and who's graph you pay attention to.
If you look at temperature records provided by proxy sources (ice cores, tree rings etc...) over hundreds of thousands of years - on many of the graphs you'll find - it's pretty clear that the last millennium has been nothing unusual.
If you look short term though, (past few hundred years) it looks pretty damning.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Methane currently makes up 0.00017% of the atmosphere. That means these very localised 100x concentrations have 0.017% methane. This would mean if this concentration was worldwide, it would be approx 10x worse than the CO2 in the atmosphere. EVERYBODY PANIC.
However these are concentrations close to the surface over a very localised area. Permafrost makes up 25% of the earths surface, so that means on average this methane will now be of concentration to be 2.5x worse than the CO2. Still pretty bad.
However there are other factors, not mentioned. It's safe to assume 100x was the worst they found, not the typical (afterall makes for the best headlines), what was the average reading? How far above the surface was the reading taken? How does the concentration diffuse as you take readings higher up?
The article also neglects to mention that Methane breaks down after about 12 years (compared to 50-100 for Co2) and there's plenty of bacteria that break it down. Whilst this may cause levels to spike, once the vents in the exposed area are spent, it won't take long for levels to stabalise again.
Imagine a cow the size of the Moon letting one rip. That's what happens when the oceans warm up.
1. The economy is going down the drain...
2. The ecosystem is going down the drain...
3. Sarah Palin is nominated for VP...
Are we starting to see a pattern here?
Anything to do with this?
1st diver: plant the flag over here, comrade.
*Plop... whoosh - bubble - bubble - bubble*
2nd diver: oops.
1st diver: Okay, try over here.
*Plop... whoosh - bubble - bubble - bubble*
C 02 times 20? That's--gasp--C20 040!
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
See grandparent: there was no seismic activity in the area. That's why there's an article about it, dunderhead.
Oh and the "record cold" you reported? That was a record for the past eight years. The trends are up, and ignoring the problem isn't helping.
In post-Soviet Russian army, your General Direktion farts at you!
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Congres rambles on the 700 billion thing, Banks are crashing in Europe, Bosenova on /. , now this.
Here's a kitten
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
Anybody checked the article on Storegga Slides in Wikipedia? Or read "The Swarm" recently? :)
There's a warm and a cool interglacial. And a glacial.
We are still in the interglacial period.
And given that the end of the last glacial period is about the same as the average interglacial period, we are NOT (repeat NOT) just out of a glacial.
fuckwit.
At the moment, it's all "oh, it's flat, innit, so not warming" but when does it stop being flat and start going down?
Give us a year. Let's see whether your "prediction" is correct.
It's been five years so far and no sign of "down".
For this kind of thing I suggest to read "The Swarm " novel from Frank Schatzing. :)
Methane Hydrate instability can be quite dangerous.....
The soviet union for example and that was an atheist state. I'm not sure if russia still has it but china certainly does and thats hardly run by the religious.
And for the record I'm an atheist and I'm for the death penalty in certain situations too , so don't assume everyone who supports it is a religious nutter.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1. Find natural gas leak
2. Blame humans for global warming
3. ???
4. Profit!
So this is how the world ends. Not with a bang but with a flatulent belch of ancient methane.
It is not the world's end....
It is just an natural incident on the sea....
www.futuretechwriters.com
mail@futuretechwriters.com
Does anyone remember that episode of Notch Johnson, where Notch was a racecar driver and fueled his car with methane gas. It sounded like a fart goin around the track, and smelled like one too. Maybe we should get mythbusters to test that out. Could solve both problems.
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
So all the "Smoking can kill you" warnings should now be postfixed with "Instantly".
Talk about gloom and doom....
anybody got a match?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Someone should sink a well down there and retire.
This time, it wasn't me!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
It should be possible to build huge floating membranes that float below the surface of the water and collect the methane into a central point where it can be pumped into pressurized tanks. The pumping stations would be powered by burning some of the methane.
Mine the clathrates now! Capturing and burning them is the only way to halt global catastrophe! A few billion dollars to Exxon and Haliburton is a small price to pay to save the world!
"...buried under the sea floor before the last ice age, breaking up as higher water temperatures melt the permafrost that had contained it..."
What am I missing?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
game over man
instead of implementing paranoid gloom and doom, why not consider this good news? Collect it and use it as some amount of replacement for oil coming out of the towel-headed middle east. Its not a perfect fuel source but its cleaner than oil and happens to be located in larger quantities in a much more stable region of the world. Siberia, as far as I am aware, doesn't go around killing people for showing their ankles. Seems like the perfect opportunity to stop empowering the religious nuts/fascist and let them die of poverty.
Don't anyone panic, it's just my mother-in-law. She's scuba diving in that region.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
It may well be normal for the ice on Greenland to melt. The problem is that if it melts, sea level will rise 20 feet. Normal or not, that's going to be devastating to people who live near the ocean. The problem with global warming is not that it's not "normal." The problem is that we're going to have to spend many billions of dollars dealing with the repercussions of global warming.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
So Russia IS close enough to Alaska that they can smell Governor Palin! //ducks
Maybe. But then there's the established scientific principle:
He who denied it supplied it.
How does this get +5 Insightful for saying nothing but "Real science agrees with me. I won't point you to any of it, but trust me, I'm right. P.S. AGW is a religion." How about some actual facts here? The only "facts" Troed has come up with in this thread are culled from skeptic web sites (which Troed doesn't even bother to cite), and are easily refuted by citations to the Real Science (TM) literature.
How about some standards here?
I saw a special recently where they went to where pockets of methane were formed below the (thinning) ice surface of a large body of water; they broke the top of the ice in several places with a shovel and were able to light up each one of them with a regular wooden match; the pockets would burn up(ward), looking like someone had hid a hand-held torch in the whole(s) with the flame reaching no higher than a few feet, for several seconds each at least.
There are some research projects and operations in the use of biogas as an energy source. Now with all of the methane under the permafrost in Siberia, if an efficient method to capture it can be devised, Russia could become the Saudi Arabia of methane.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
For us middle-class first worlders a tick up or down isn't a big deal but getting out of grinding subsistence agriculture and moving up the ladder to a merely crappy factory job means the difference between losing one sibling or three in the 3rd world.
What to keep more of the money you work to earn, and help the population in the Third World? Force government to stop giving hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies to Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and other agricultural businesses. This year alone congress approved a $280 Billion farm bill by a veto proof margin. With these subsidies ADM and Cargill can export food to the Third World to sale it there for less than Third World farmers can grow food. Other First World nations are just as bad as the US. Australia, Canada, the EU, and Japan give large subsidies as well.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
At the very least, a sudden release of mass amounts of methane could create immense hurricanes, even if no ignition takes place. The entertaining science fiction disaster novel Mother of Storms by John Barnes is based on that premise.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
They could also become the Russia of methane!!
Evil, evil empires i tell ya.
NO SIG
which is a truly wonderful plan. Honestly, it is!
But could you answer one small question - what's the technology you're going to use for capture of this methane. After all, it's present over very wide areas, which is why the quantities are vast ; but the tonnage under one particular point is actually quite small. If you have more than about 5% of the methane under a target area leaking out of your collection apparatus, then the greenhouse effect impact of the methane leaked is going to be bigger than the impact of the rest of the mthane captured and burned to CO2.
To transport the methane captured efficiently to market, you're going to have to compress it considerably. That's got a significant energy cost, so you can take that out of your energy budget.
Maybe the clathrate methane ores can themselves be bulk-shipped to closer to market. Ah, but that implies bulk-shipping megatonnes of rather dirty water. Put that on the negative side of the energy-balance equation.
I get quizzed on the potential of exploiting methane clathrates almost every time I go off to do my work - drilling oil wells. The people questioning me, and trying to work out solutions to the problems of exploitation and transport are mainly experienced petroleum engineers, pipeline workers, drilling engineers, mining engineers (making a better living this half-decade in the oil rather than in the minerals ; next half-decade, it'll be back to minerals). While we come up with some interesting and semi-plausible schemes, no-one who actually does this stuff for a living thinks it's going to be anything other than very difficult, and hugely expensive to develop. For a comparison, look at the tar-sands which are just starting to come on-stream and be significant - ideas about methane-clathrate mining are at the stage that tar-sand exploitation was in the early 1970s. It's hardly made it to the level of "back of an envelope".
Methane-clathrates are a potentially significant energy source, but it's not something that's going to be commercial this side of the 2020s, if not the 2030s. Which is OK ; if the banking system hasn't collapsed, that'll be about time for me to retire, and able to experiment with off-the-wall stuff as an option to supplement my income.
Hey, it might even be commercial in time to fill part of the energy gap which will happen after the oil has returned to being a chemical feedstock, and as the coal production is falling through the floor. That'll be good - it'll allow humankind to continue in the delusion that energy is always going to be available for another half-generation or so.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
We folks here in cold Norway are looking forward to getting tanned at the beach during the winter. Thanks all. You rock.
BTW, thanks for not joining the Kyoto agreement USA.
On and off, for several years, sea-level and satellite readings of methane in these areas have been used as indicators of their potential for more-or-less conventional hydrocarbons. Booo - satellite can't be relied on any more for this. I guess that it's back to shooting conventional seismic (which is on schedule anyway), dipping the water for geochemical tracers, looking for natural oil slicks on satelite photos of ice-free water, and all the other conventional techniques.
Errr, which were being done any way (or the seismic campaigns were being touted for contractors with suitable seismic boats with suitable gaps in their schedules). Oh well, film at eleven.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I oppose agri-subsidies, especially now that bumper crops can be diverted out of the food chain to supply fuel. The free market doesn't get subsidized. That's corporatism, technically economic fascism.
Agreed. I oppose almost all subsidies, I haven't seen one I supported everything else being equal. I do support subsidies for alternative energy sources but only because other energy sources get subsidies as well. If coal, hydro, nuclear, and petroleum weren't subsidized then I wouldn't support subsidies for alternatives either.
As it is, subsidies were only supposed to be temporary. But they have become a perpetual motion machine, every year they keep being given. And given in larger and larger amounts.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
To quote someone famous, "Republicans are terrified of dying poor."
Can you help us with that quote? No luck with "Republicans are terrified of dying poor" at Google, except this post, as of now.
Now with all of the methane under the permafrost in Siberia, if an efficient method to capture it can be devised, Russia could become the Saudi Arabia of methane.
which is a truly wonderful plan. Honestly, it is!
If the methane can effective captured it would be good. Methane is 20 tymes more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas but by burning it CO2 will be released. Hydrogen can also be made from methane by reforming it.
But could you answer one small question - what's the technology you're going to use for capture of this methane.
That's the hangup, capturing the methane. Here's some researchers extracting methane from permafrost. I read some tyme ago about a Russian oil company working on a way to capture methane.
I get quizzed on the potential of exploiting methane clathrates almost every time I go off to do my work - drilling oil wells.
This brings up something I don't understand, oil companies burn off methane where they drill and pump, those flares. Is that because it's difficult and or expensive to transport?
look at the tar-sands which are just starting to come on-stream and be significant
Doesn't the tar-sands, at least in Alberta, require a lot of water and energy to heat the water?
coal production is falling through the floor
Though I'd love to see that the US has 100s of years of coal, at least the way we're using today. I don't know how long it will last if it's gasified and used for purposes other than power plants.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
If, in the end, the increased wealth that CO2 emissions bring you allows you to clean up practices that are polluting and you save more lives than global warming costs, the emissions are worth it even if the most dire of global warming predictions are true.
What increased wealth that CO2 emissions create? The increase in poison ivy? The reduction in the growth rates of other plants. The increase in cooling costs? Drought in some places while others flood?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
a) even if you capture and burn the stuff that's bubbling up, you're still reducing the overall GHG load, but even better, if you
b) capture the effluent CO2, it may be possible to push it into the sediments in replacement for the methane clathrates.
What's even better is to reform the methane into hydrogen.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
It's not a cause for panic, it's something to look into. Even if this change has no global implications, the Arctic is changing in ways that make it very worth keeping an eye on.
I just thought of another possible implication. I wonder if methane acid could form, I'm not a chemist or chemical engineer so I don't know. CO2 is already acidifying the oceans. And that acid eats the shells of shellfish.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Here is your link: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
It seems there might be a better match when looking at solar activity
"Sun's Power Hits New Low".
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I read a paper by some muslim cleric justifying the murdering of civilians in Israel. Jewish babies grow up and everybody is Israel is required to server time in the military.
However not all Israelis are Jews. Israel also has Arab, Christian, and Muslim citizens. There are Arab members of the Knesset, Israeli parliament. There are even Jews for Jesus and Jews for Allah.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The soviet union for example and that was an atheist state. I'm not sure if russia still has it but china certainly does and thats hardly run by the religious.
Sure, China executes criminals. The government will even bill the family of the person executed for the cost of the bullet, at least they used to.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Western science of course was born out of Christian religion
Nice try. Christians persecuted scientists and others with knowledge. When Queen Isabella told Spanish Moors and Sephardi Jews to convert or leave Spain suffered a massive brain drain, most of the educated in Spain were Jews or Muslims. During the Age of Enlightenment scientific authority started displacing religious authority.
Err, I think you got that confused. How under an atheist world view how does a consciousness (which is usually under such a view a complex anomaly of brain chemistry) live for "all time"?
Under atheism it doesn't but Christians do believe in a soul that is immortal. As one battle cry goes, "Kill them all, let God sort them out." An atheist can't say that, and believe it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Another poster pointed out that I mixed up the geologic epoch and was talking about something totally different than the original poster was. Although I suppose it's still marginally on topic since it has to do with methane emissions.
Sampling of such articles here:
(1) "Fire Under Arctic Ice: Volcanoes Have Been Blowing Their Tops In The Deep Ocean" http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080625140649.htm
(2) "Arctic ocean volcano blew its top â" even under pressure" http://environment.newscientist.com/article/mg19826625.800
(3) "Arctic Volcanoes Found Active at Unprecedented Depths" http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/06/080626-arctic-volcano.html
Possible methods to resolve question:
(a) send robot submersible with video camera down the methane plume to see what is happening on the ocean floor (i.e. seeing is believing). Is it cold & dark or warm and glowing red?
(b) audit regional distribution of frozen methane on arctic ocean floor, plotting location/concentration relative to undersea arctic ocean volcanoes and hot-water vents
(c) place sensors on ocean floor to measure temperature & pressure
Many people would look foolish if it later turned out the frozen methane was melting due to localized heating of the seabed caused by magma (lava) flows and/or geysers spewing hot water as happens along various undersea ridges
I believe Juanita
Hmmm, [reads cited site] OK, so they drilled a well to a depth of hundreds of metres to extract hydrates from a zone of unspecified thickness, for an unspecified radius around the well centre. ...
Maybe they used steam heating to destabilise the hydrates, then the methane comes up (while the steam condenses to water). Which is great. Until
Converting hydrate to relatively clean water (or later, water ice) changes it's density from about 0.9 tonnes/m^3 to about 1.0. So for each 10 metre thickness of hydrate converted, you get a 1 metre subsidence of the ground surface, working to collapse your wellbore and and lining pipes (we call it casing). This is a well-understood engineering problem - look up the Ekofisk field, where about a half-dozen oil platforms had to be jacked up by up to 3 metres because of subsidence caused by [reasons entirely unrelated to hydrates] ; it was a major and innovative piece of engineering that the Noggies are rightly proud of. With a little luck, and a skilled and well-equipped drill crew, you might be able to retrieve some of the casing (we call it "pulling casing" ; it's a moderately frequent operation), as long as the wellbore hasn't collapsed too badly.
How long your well is going to last depends on the thickness and area of the hydrate layer being extracted - the traditional unit of measure in the oilfield is the acre-foot (area X vertical-thickness-of reservoir) ; how many acres you can drain is determined by the permeability of the reservoir - in this case the soil between the ice crystals in the permafrost. The various bits of permafrost I've squelched through haven't had evidence of good permeability, so that's not a good sign for large productivity per well. The more vertical thickness you extract, the greater the collapse stresses you're going to impose on your wellbore. The limiting case, which you don't want to happen, is if you generate (part of) a circular fracture from your hydrate reservoir to the surface, and your steam (or warm water) and associated methane finds an easier path to a lower pressure environment through the fracture. It's called a blowout - think Red Adair (played by John Wayne in that hilarious film), or more soberingly the Lusi mud volcano in Indonesia. Doubleplusungood.
Gut feeling in the drilling professionals - to pursue this strategy, you're going to have to be drilling wells at a spacing comparable to the depth of your hydrate reservoir, and you're going to be lucky to get months of life out of a well. Envisage a fleet of drilling rigs (small ones, it's true) working their way across the permafrost fields. Look at the energy costs this would entail ; and then look at the haul roads, access roads etc that you'll need.
It might work ; it might produce more energy than it consumes ; but it'd take a serious amount of project assessment work to determine if it's feasible. Me, I'd be interested to work on such a project, but I'd not invest in it.
Yeah. I bet they'll have had very familiar-sounding conversations, but in Russian. I've worked a fair bit in Russia and I respect their drilling capabilities and experience. Their through-string retrievable bit systems sound fascinating. I'd be really interested to see what they've come up with.
The state of reserve reporting, internationally and intranationally, makes the state of oil reserve reporting look good. That's before the 25% write-off from Shell's reserve books and such like. Repeating the successful
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
And of course, all your sources are unimpeachable, deeply imbued with nothing but the essence of honesty, integrity, impartiality, and infallibility. None of the generate global warmist data in at attempt to get more funding and grants.
Exxon has more money to spend on research than Greenpeace does. Overall industry has more resources than environmental groups have, so why isn't there more studies disputing Global Warming than there is supporting it?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
There appears to have been a significant jump in methane levels in 2007 based on this alarming graphic. Global methane (CH4) concentrations rose in 2007. http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/images/methanetrend.jpg But wait, it all depends on how you present the data. Figure 2. Global averages of the concentrations of the major, well-mixed, long-lived greenhouse gases http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi_2008.fig2.png Not quite as alarming when you present the data in its historical context. The methane horse is dead and the greenies are just going to have to come up with a new way to scare little children in the night. These tactics are so predictable that I am not finding much sport in the lies any longer. Earth to greenies, methane concentrations stopped increasing at just about the same time that global warming stopped. Could it be a coincidence? As the Sun sinks into an increasingly quiescent state, I find myself looking forward the big green spin machine explaining the Sun away. The games afoot and let the fun begin. You are going to have to be truly creative this time. Are you up to the task? How convincing a lie can be fabricated this time around.
It's called a blowout - think Red Adair (played by John Wayne in that hilarious film)
"Hellfighters" is one of my favorite movies.
Lusi mud volcano
Yea, I heard about that a couple of years ago. Mud keeps oozing out.
Coal reserves:
Reserve estimates of "hundreds of years" are not ones that their proponents defend when challenged. But like I said, this is an area of active research ; my understanding and reporting may be wrong, but I'd like to see the figure you're basing your estimate on.
It's not my estimate, just what I've heard. Ok, I found this, which backs you up: "Science Panel Finds Fault With Estimates of Coal Supply". It was the first result googling "coal reserves" science.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?