Russian Scientist Discovers Giant Arctic Methane Plumes

thomst writes "Russian scientist Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks revealed in an interview with The Independent that his team discovered 'powerful and impressive seeping structures (of Methane gas) more than 1,000 metres in diameter' during their survey of the Arctic Ocean earlier this year. 'I was most impressed by the sheer scale and the high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them,' Semiletov told The Independent's Steve Connor. This finding is important because methane is estimated to be 20 times as potent as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and it could indicate that global warming is about to accelerate dramatically."

Comments

Sorry!

[nullnick]

It was the dog!

Re:Sorry!

[flyneye]

In space, no one can hear you fart, but, in the arctic no one can blame it on you.

Methane emissions not tied to modern warming

[DamonHD]

In this case it seems that most of the methane is locked up far deeper than will be affected by rising temperatures for the foreseeable future.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011EO490014.shtml

So, not good, but maybe not as bad as appears at first blush, thankfully...

Rgds

Damon

Re:Methane emissions not tied to modern warming

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully they're right. This older review from Real Climate comes to the same conclusion.

But we'll know for sure one way or another in a couple of years, by watching the atmospheric methane concentrations
.

Re:Methane emissions not tied to modern warming

[Lumpy]

So why not tap it and burn it off? it's a shallow sea cant they drill and start sucking?

Re:Methane emissions not tied to modern warming

[alcarinque]

Wasn't something like this that caused one of the biggest extinctions ever? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event#Methane_hydrate_gasification

Re:Methane emissions not tied to modern warming

[aurizon]

Temperate methane clathrates are deeper and stabilized by pressure in warmer water. The Arctic clathrates, as mentioned in this article, exist over huge land areas and were stabilized by temperature under permafrost and there is also a lot in the shallow of the arctic, also cold stabilized. Both the water based and tundra based clathrates are being released now. This is very ominous. Nothing we can do will prevent this - not even a total cessation of coal/oil/gas combustion - and we know how likely that is!
Part of the methane from millions of years of vegetative rotting on tundra and shallow seas was trapped in these clathrates. Large areas of tundra are also emitting methane the same way.

dig deeper here http://tinyurl.com/d64n5zb

Bill

Re:Methane emissions not tied to modern warming

[Culture20]

Spain was filled with moors in 750AD, but there's no indication they were gassier than other people.

Re:Methane emissions not tied to modern warming

[nadaou]

methane is a more potent ghg, but only really sticks around in the upper atm for 25 to 125 years before it breaks down to co2+h2o. co2 sticks around until the next epoch of mass vegetation.
cumulatively (if you integrate it wrt dt), co2 is still much worse, and methane is just delayed co2.

and yes, it is typically too diffuse to economically mine. but people are certainly willing to try.

the melting pt is around 4C, if the oceans at 1000m get up to that we hit the ghg positive feedback loop doomsday scenario.

fun times.

in this case I wonder if volcanic activity might be warming the earth below a patch.

Re:Methane emissions not tied to modern warming

[Waffle Iron]

That sounds fascinating. Please name the event it so we can google it.

Ok, it took me about 3 seconds on Google to find this page on the USGS website:

At the end of the last Ice Age, a finger of the Cordilleran ice sheet crept southward into the Idaho panhandle, forming a large ice dam that blocked the mouth of the Clark Fork River, creating a massive lake 2000 feet deep and containing more than 500 cubic miles of water. Glacial Lake Missoula stretched eastward for some 200 miles and contained more water than Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined. When the highest of these ice dams failed, lake water burst through, shooting out at a rate 10 times the combined flow of all the rivers of the world.

This towering mass of water and ice literally shook the ground as it thundered toward the Pacific Ocean, stripping away hundreds of feet of soil and cutting deep canyons -- "coulees" -- into the underlying bedrock. With flood speeds approaching 65 miles per hour, the lake would have drained in as little as 48 hours.

Re:Methane emissions not tied to modern warming

[cusco]

These are clathrate deposits, frozen blocks of methane. It would take the equivalent of underwater strip mines to get at the stuff, and it's so unstable that it's almost impossible to handle safely. They've looked at mining clathrate deposits along the continental shelves, and even those paragons of environmental caution BP and Exxon decided it was unfeasible.

Why do scientists make these statements?

[Zondar]

""The concentration of atmospheric methane increased unto three times in the past two centuries from 0.7 parts per million to 1.7ppm, and in the Arctic to 1.9ppm. That's a huge increase, between two and three times,"

I'm OK with her statement, until this:

"...and this has never happened in the history of the planet," she added.

So there's data for the last 4+ BILLION years with 10-50 year precision so that over a 100-200 year timespan, she can measure the slope of the line (rate in rise over the run of time) precisely enough to say that the slope of the line over the last 200 years is steeper than it has been in any other 200 year period in the last 4 billion years? Sorry, but I find that hard to believe.

Re:Why do scientists make these statements?

[TheRaven64]

I'd believe most of what a scientist says to a journalist. I have more of a problem believing things that a journalist hears from a scientist...

Re:Why do scientists make these statements?

[zill]

with our current high period being an extended one

"Extended"? How about "off the charts"? The current ch4 concentration is 1745 ppbv, which is almost twice the peak on that chart.

and yes their are higher peeks

No, there hasn't been. This planet has not seen this much CO2 or methane in the past 400,000 years according to that graph.

Re:Why do scientists make these statements?

[Anonymous Coward]

What graph are you looking at? Cause the graph I'm looking at shows both CO2 levels and CH4 levels higher at about 125kya and 325kya.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_420ky_4curves_insolation.jpg

So this planet HAS seen this much or more CO2 and methane in the past 400,000 years according to that graph.

Re:Why do scientists make these statements?

[Lumpy]

Cthulhu... his farts of death! They existed 400,000 years ago.

Re:Why do scientists make these statements?

[zill]

That chart only covers the ice-core data, which doesn't include the past few hundred years. Google "CO2 ppmv" and "methane ppbv" and you'll see that the current levels are off the charts. I've even graphed it out for you here. Sorry about my shitty photoshop skills.

Re:Why do scientists make these statements?

[jlehtira]

You're right, that's obviously nonsense. We don't have such data. Further, it's been suggested that the Permian Extinction, killing (up to) 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates, was caused by a sudden release of methane. So there's indication that large increases did happen before, although there's no way of telling how fast.

Re:Why do scientists make these statements?

[thomst]

""The concentration of atmospheric methane increased unto three times in the past two centuries from 0.7 parts per million to 1.7ppm, and in the Arctic to 1.9ppm. That's a huge increase, between two and three times,"

I'm OK with her statement, until this:

"...and this has never happened in the history of the planet," she added.

So there's data for the last 4+ BILLION years with 10-50 year precision so that over a 100-200 year timespan, she can measure the slope of the line (rate in rise over the run of time) precisely enough to say that the slope of the line over the last 200 years is steeper than it has been in any other 200 year period in the last 4 billion years? Sorry, but I find that hard to believe.

I suspect she's talking about it having never previously happened in a span of just a couple of centuries.

A dramatic increase in atmospheric methane - triggered by a dramatic rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide? Now that's definitely happened before - at the end of the Permian Period. And it helped cause the Permian/Triassic extinction event, the largest species die-off since the Oxygen Catastrophe.

Re:The next question

[Joce640k]

The momentary heat would be nothing compared to having all that methane around for the next hundred years.

Re:The next question

[Anonymous Coward]

Drilling for methane hydrate deposits is one of the 'unconventional' energy resources that's had a lot of attention paid to it in the last while. I believe the Japanese, amongst several others, are paying a lot of attention to it as there are some big deposits off their coast.

However, the relative 'tightness' (poor quality) of the sediment its found in makes it difficult to extract. It's a completely different situation compared to a conventional gas reservoir.

Ironically enough, the poor quality and relative depth of the sediment could be the thing that stops this being as bad as some people think it could be.

when did it start?

[argStyopa]

Nothing I see in that article suggests that this is a new phenomenon...aside from the hyperbolic statements of the scientists.

The author is astonishingly remiss in not asking the obvious question: did this just start? It could be that such methane plumes have existed forever, we just never detected them. This is the EIGHTH such cruise/survey. They should be able to conclusively say "we checked this area in at least one or two previous instances and such seeps weren't observed", no?

It seems logical that there must have been plumes like this for a while, to prompt (and justify) such a large-scale survey.

Yet both the scientists and article author seem to gloss over the fact that "never seen before" != "never happened before".

Re:when did it start?

[wytcld]

Plumes have been seen before. This has been reported in other articles on this. However the plumes seen before were neither so large nor grouped so closely together.

Your painting the scientists as "hyperbolic" speakers establishes, what, that you know a big word and can use it correctly in a sentence? This should cause us to see you as smarter than research scientists with advanced degrees and many years of expeditions to gather evidence? Trust me, they have a far larger vocabulary than you do. Yet you are the one speaking hyperbolically. Now, what drives you to that?

It's not as if the waters where these were found were terra incognito - or mare incognito - the arctic has been peopled for thousands of years, particularly by the Russians, which is how they came to possess not just Siberia but Alaska. So when a Russian, in particular, says the like has not been seen before, that's someone reporting from a culture which has a good historical knowledge of what's been there to be seen. Sort of like getting a report on the normalcy or not of current tornadoes from someone with deep roots in Oklahoma.

Re:when did it start?

[c0lo]

Nothing I see in that article suggests that this is a new phenomenon...aside from the hyperbolic statements of the scientists.

Hmmmm... TFA...

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who led the 8th joint US-Russia cruise of the East Siberian Arctic seas, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

"Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing," Dr Semiletov said.

So, 20 years of beating around the Arctics and seeing seepings of 10s m in diameter and, unlucky them, it is only recently that they found the larger ones... What are the chances? I mean, pretty hard luck to miss something that large and find only the smaller ones for 20 years... I wonder why the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks keeps such unlucky researchers on its payroll?

Re:The next question

[Smidge204]

That link doesn't exist.

Methane has an atmospheric lifetime of about 12 years. However it is MUCH more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, so over a 20 year period a ton of methane will cause the same amount of global warming as 72 tons of carbon dioxide. Consider that a ton of methane, burned, would produce about 3.7 tons of carbon dioxide, burning it is a valid approach to mitigating the impact on our climate.

Setting the plumes on fire is a big silly, though. We should trap the gas and use it to displace petroleum fuels.
=Smidge=

Re:The next question

[Smallpond]

Great plan! We have large quantities of a gas that causes global warming. So then you burn it an end up huge amounts of extra warm and a gas that causes a bit less warming.

methane absorbs 20 times as much IR as the water and CO2 that would result from burning it, so its probably a net win to burn it.