Arctic melt releasing ancient methane

www.bbc.co.uk...

Using aerial and ground-based surveys, the team identified about 150,000 methane seeps in Alaska and Greenland in lakes along the margins of ice cover.

Well that doesn't bode well for the atmosphere whatever your views on the climate and greenhouse gasses.

Originally posted by johnb
www.bbc.co.uk...

Using aerial and ground-based surveys, the team identified about 150,000 methane seeps in Alaska and Greenland in lakes along the margins of ice cover.

Well that doesn't bode well for the atmosphere whatever your views on the climate and greenhouse gasses.

Also makes you wonder what else is frozen in the ice up there!

Well the smart thing to do would be to burn it in our automobiles.
but how could we capture it???

Old earth farts. How cool is that lol!
I love this stuff!
Thanks for the thread - interesting stuff that.

peace

It's interesting how this is at least the 6th news article over the past 3 months from a mainstream and/or known source that has gone into the methane release. The severity of this should be more known as it is fully capable of accelerating climate change at a rate that our oblivious nature will even notice in due time.

At this point we can just hope that the release is quelled somehow by nature.

Massive amounts released could easily flip the planet into chaos.

150,000 seeps near Greenland and Alaska sounds intimidating. Most of the articles I had read before spoke of Siberia as the main culprit.

The weather here in Canada has been reaching both ends of the spectrum. On April 28th it was about 18C here in NL, and on April 29th we had a fair snowfall. Since then we've been getting two days of warm weather, including a few 20C+ days, followed by days where it barely goes above 5C. Night is usually freezing lately, though some have been too hot, too.

The tornado outbreaks in March and April should have been an indication to the US that temperatures are shifting as of late. Same for Europe with the mini ice-age earlier in the year.

The last 12 months were the hottest in US history since record-keeping began in 1895.

NOAA

"January-April 2012 was the warmest such period on record for the contiguous United States, with an average temperature of 45.4 degrees F, 5.4 degrees F above the long-term average. Twenty-six states, all east of the Rockies, were record warm for the four-month period, and an additional 17 states had temperatures for the period among their ten warmest."

reply to post by murkraz


i agree with you. we've already created an obscene amount of it with all the cows needed for dairy and meat production (way way way more than nature ever intended and has not evolved a balance for). adding in the methane coming out of the melting ice....... could tip things a hell of a lot faster than we thought.

reply to post by johnb
I really don't see any concern. 1000 years ago Greenland had no ice at all and the Earth was much, much warmer (by about 3C) 125,000 years ago during the last interglacial-period, the Eemian, and methane didn't destroy anything. Henry's law sets a fixed-partitioning ratio for gases between the atmosphere and the ocean, I don't know what the partitioning ratio is for methane, but whatever it is, if methane gets added to the atmosphere, a large portion of it will have to be dissolved into the oceans. The same holds true for CO2.

Originally posted by Nathan-D
reply to post by johnb

 

I really don't see any concern. 1000 years ago Greenland had no ice at all .

Where'd you get that from?

The ice sheet on Greenland is 110,000 years old, champ.

and the Earth was much, much warmer (by about 3C) 125,000 years ago during the last interglacial-period, the Eemian, and methane didn't destroy anything.

Didnt destroy anything? Well, The oceans were 4-6 metres (12-18 ft) higher than now. That would, obviously, destroy quite a bit today. And seasonal temperature shifts were more than likely more pronounced than today, which would make growing most commercial crops very difficult.

These are the sort of 'point of no return' tipping points climate scientists were warning about a decade ago.

We have passed the point of no return. As the climate continues to warm, we will see more feedback loops like this that, once set n motion, will continue to speed up the warming of the atmosphere, triggering more feedback loops.

I seen a show on TV a few years back saying that if the methane levels got high enough there could be a planet wide flash fire that would set fire to most if not the whole planet. I forget what they said the levels would have to be for this to happen but they did say it is believed that it has happen before in the past. I can not find anything on it just now. If anyone else can feel free to post it.

Well just found this and apparently we are using CO2 to 'mine' the methane hydrates out of these areas

h ttp://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/neil-reynolds/methane-hydrate-technology-fuels-a-new-energy-regime/article2433611/
So of course now we can start worrying about them ballsing that up too and releasing huge uncontrollable bursts of methane

They are suggesting we have 1000's of years of energy trapped in these rocks etc

According to one conservative academic calculation, Earth’s conventional reserves of natural gas hold 96 billion tonnes of carbon. Earth’s reserves of oil contain 160 billion tonnes. Earth’s reserves of coal contain 675 billion tonnes: Taken together, 931 billion tonnes of fossil fuel. But Earth’s methane hydrates contain 3,000 billion tons of carbon.