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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."
It was the dog!
""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.
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".
-Styopa
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=
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.
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