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Massive Methane Release In the Arctic Region
Taco Cowboy writes "Arctic methane release is a well recorded phenomenon. Methane stored in both permafrost (which is melting) and methane hydrates (methane trapped in marine reservoirs) are vulnerable to being released into the atmosphere as the planet warms. However, researchers who are trying to map atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations on a global basis have discovered that the amount of methane emissions in the Arctic region do not total up. Further research revealed that significant amounts of methane releases came from the Arctic ocean (abstract) — as much as 2 milligrams of the gas is released per square meter of ocean, each day — presumably by marine bacteria surviving in low-nutrient environments."
People have been concerned about the possibility of a Clathrate gun for a while. Is this another potentially lethal feedback loop?
And if it fires, or has already fired, will we notice immediately?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
The rotting has long since happened. The most likely source are methane clathrates sequestered for ages and now getting destabilized.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Its pretty much too late to do anything useful. There are some way out there schemes but the most positive effect for species survival now is figuring out how to sustain our population on a warming Earth. We're going to have to get used to more extreme weather limits and redo our calculations and weather models for starters.
I suspect that cephalopods are about to be in for a pretty wild ride. As the ocean acidifies, shell fish will have less and less protection as the calcium carbonate that makes up the bulk of their shells gets dissolved more rapidly than they can replace it. This may lead to a population boom which will be quickly turn in to a starvation scenario.
If this happens, large marine predatory fish will go through a smaller version of this, which could be followed by the replacement of these fish in their niche by large predatory cephalopods. (most likely the D. gigas or A. dux)
Of course, that's just a guess. Everything in the ocean that relies on calcium carbonate is in for a rough time. This includes fish teeth and cephalopod beaks.
Another whammy is that as the ocean acidifies, the calcium carbonate reacts with the acid to form calcium bicarbonate and carbon dioxide, further increasing the saturation of the surrounding water resulting in a lower pH and a more intense feedback loop.
(o) So those trapped gases must have been in the air at some point, millions of years ago, and then planet did just fine. So what's there to worry about? Uh.....
Yeah, the planet did fine, but it didn't support human life at the time. So, if human life is something you would like supported, then maybe there is a problem.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
Millions of years ago, the climate (read: atmosphere) would've killed large mammals reliant on an oxygen rich environment (which is what is happening now, slowly but surely). The problem isn't that life would not be able to "get by just fine." It's that if the geology of Earth shifts back towards a carbon-rich environment, it won't be conducive to living comfortably, as a human. This is my understanding, anyway.
The argument over whether or not it is a natural occurance is a big one (and worth having, IMO), but global warming nay-sayers choose to be ignorant of the fact that the "natural" environment of yester-millenia would literally kill them in a few short, labored gasps.
So I wondered just how much methane 2 mg/m^2/day is, and here's the breakdown:
2 mg/m^2/day times the area of the Arctic ocean (13,986,000 km^2) is 27,972,000 kg/day, or about 10.2 Tg/year.
10.2 Tg/year can be compared on this chart to other sources. This is not an insignificant amount, but is an order of magnitude less than just the contribution from farm animals.
I'm not a climate scientist, and can't say what this may or may not mean for AGW, but it puts the size of the emission into perspective.
Sure. Grant money is the sole motivator of all scientific endeavor. All that cash must be the reason why all scientists are driving around in their shiny Ferraris, two bitches alternatingly sucking their cocks all the time, while snorting coke from the dashboard. Or something like that. Fascinating to see how the "poisoning the well" smear campaign by the usual conservative think tanks permeates the debate these days.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
No need to waste time over the cause, I think those two camps are entrenched and few will change their minds on the actual cause. The fact is the feedback loop is already starting which means it's likely self-perpetuating or soon will be. It also means the increase can be much greater than any of the projections since no one is sure how much methane can be released so most haven't factored it in to projections. It's unlikely that the climate change can be stopped but that's no reason to not limit CO2. There was always a much bigger issue that rarely gets mentioned and that's ocean acidification. Acid oceans kill fish and coral and we don't get our oxygen and food from rain forests we get most of the oxygen and a lot of our food from the oceans so killing them is a bad idea.
Red Sox wins World Series (2004 and 2007): check
Duke Nukem Forever released (2011): check
Dick Clark dies (2012): check
Antarctica releases methane gases (2012): check
The Mayans were right!
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
'News' about global warming... AGAIN??
... I got better.
When do we stop chasing that ghost and get over it? Really...
The big freeze, acid rain, a gap in the ozon layer, and now this witch hunt. *sigh*
Can we, for the sake of Cowboy Neal, just stop doing this, get real and do some real science?
It all sounds like:
Sir Bedevere: What makes you think there is global warming?
Peasant: Well, the global warming turned me into a newt!
Sir Bedevere: A newt?
Peasant: -meekly-
Crowd: (shouts) Stop driving your car anyway!!!
Zjeeeez...
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Dinosaurs lived at much higher temperatures.
They ate all the people back then though.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
It has been warming.
I don't remember the exact details, but I thought it was like this:
If you cherry-pick the two years 1998 and 2008 (1998 being quite warm and 2008 a bit colder than the trend), and fit a line on the 10 temperatures from that particular 10 year period, then you can't say with 95% certainty that there's an upward trend, but only with less certainty IIRC. And they put Phil Jones on the spot "can you say with 95% certainty that it became warmer in that 10 year period?". So he had to say no.
I used the emotionally laden word cherry-pick because if you take another recent period of 10 years, or another period ending at 2008, or another period starting at 1998, then the upward trend is much clearer.
Please look at the graph: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif .
Guess why the years 1998 and 2008 were taken. Get the data yourself (from NOAA or HadCRUT3), and plot it with something that can draw a linear regression line from the past 15 years that you mentioned (1996 to 2011) or just use a ruler and some common sense to draw a line through the points.
Then do the same for 1998 to 2008 (the cherry-picked data), and finally to see the famous "hockey-stick" one from 1898 to 2008.
Don't waste your time arguing why I'm wrong or stupid, just go download that data and draw it for yourself. I dare you.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
That's great. Now we just have to adjust our civilization to work the same as that other advanced civilization that existed 2.5 million years ago, and we're all set.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
gregmark mused:
(o) So those trapped gases must have been in the air at some point, millions of years ago, and then planet did just fine. So what's there to worry about? Uh.....
The carbon component of "those trapped gases" (i.e. - methane) may well have been "in the air" at some point in the past - but likely not as part of a methane molecule. Methane is a gas mainly produced by the decomposition of organic material. When the last ice age descended (most likely because of a meteorite or cometary impact event), it swiftly buried boreal forests in ice, and Arctic temperatures have kept the ground that they're now buried under frozen solid (which is why it's called "permafrost"). As the temperature warms, and that permafrost thaws, the decay process that the ice suspended will restart, and cause the dead and buried plant life to rot, producing very large quantities of methane gas from the carbon that used to be part of that plant life.
As for how methane clathrates (the other very large source of methane gas releases) are formed, I have yet to see a convincing explanation of the mechanism. That notwithstanding, the fact that they DO exist is indisputable - and, when deepwater temperatures rise far enough, they definitely will melt, releasing their cargo of methane into the atmosphere (the so-called "methane clathrate gun" effect) more-or-less all at once.
The current consensus is that it was the global release of large volumes of methane in the transition from the Permian to the Triassic Periods that caused the extremely large (20+ degrees Fahrenheit) increase in global temperatures that resulted in what is known as the Permian Extinction - an event that resulted in the extinction of more than 90% of all then-extant species on Earth. What is particularly scary about that event - the worst mass extinction since the Oxygen Catastrophe - is that the release of all that methane seems to have been initiated by a sharp increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the Permian, that surge of CO2 was caused by a huge, long-lasting basalt flow event (a kind of large-scale volcanic eruption) called the Siberian Traps.
Today, however, the increase in atmospheric CO2 is largely manmade. Regardless of its source, the marginal warming effect of all that CO2 our electric power generation, heating, combustion engine-based transportation, and large-scale deforestation is producing will, without question, eventually result in a massive methane release, just as happened in the Permian. Our atmospheric CO2 levels are already very close to those that triggered the methane releases that resulted in the Permain Extinction, and there's no technolgy currently in existence that will allow us to "scrub" that CO2 out of our atmosphere. That, in turn, means that we're pretty much stuck with a future in which the planet warms suffiiciently to melt the polar and Greenland icecaps - and all the world's glaciers, as well - and release the methane clathrate deposits, too. How long this will take is the main unanswered question, now. The international consensus is that it will be on the order of a millenium before the planetary warming process reaches its peak, but there's some reason to believe that the icecaps are what used to be known as "chaotic systems" (i.e. - systems whose existing state is highly unstable, and subject to very rapid change if the conditions under which they are maintained change in relatively modest ways), and, if so, the collapse of the world's ice sheets could happen in as little as a century or so.
This is the problem with the plea for "simple answers". The systems we're talking about aren't simple - they're vast, complex, and (by the timescale of a single human life) slow-moving. The time to get out ahead of global warming was the 1970's. It's far too late now to prevent the planet from warming enough to melt the icecaps and change the climate sufficiently to result in another mass extinction event. At this point, we can only try to slow the process down, not stop
Check out my novel.
Fifteen or twenty years ago, the buzz was about diminishing rain forests. Before that, it was extinction. It seems like people get tired of a world consumption message, give up on caring, and look for a new "problem" to warn ourselves about. Warming is the new rain forest, which was the new extinction. As a fifty year old environmentalist, I wonder how wise it was to take peoples focus off of habitat and onto thermometers. We need big forests to suck up the carbon. Now, that arrow is gone.
Gently reply