That comment in a recent article along with the following adaptation (from the French) of a story sent to me by a colleague in Quebec Canada made me reflect on why the global community is not focused and active on pushing for immediate reductions in greenhouse emission.

We don’t see it as affecting us directly today. We know the world is warming at a rate that will cause a radical shift in the way we live in the coming decades, still we don’t act. The question to be asked and for you to answer is when will you? Does it need to hit you personally, to devastate your life and that of those you love?

From the frozen north, now warming at an alarming rate comes this observation by Par Moukmouk le jeudi of the village of Pohenegamouk, not far from Montréal – I pay all credit to his observations.  

I am not alone in giving news about North. The newspapers are full. But why the focus on what happens elsewhere?

In France, Betancourt’s case occupies journalists; here is a change in the law on the census. Yes, there are many fires in Russia and floods in Pakistan, but that’s not going to pay the mortgage, or find the love of my life.

Caribou by tens of thousands are moving slowly in the treeless plain bordering the Arctic Ocean. There were mountains here, but the glaciers have crashed, it remains as soft undulations as small breasts of young women. There is not a single tree as far as the eye. Here, the permafrost layer under a few inches when pushing the moss and grass particularly abundant this year, there are tens of meters of ice mixed with soil of moraine rock crushed as finely as flour by the friction of glaciers.

A caribou walks a bit away to a clump of grass that seems appetizing. Suddenly, he sinks into the ground; he struggles to swim and wants what does widens the pool of mud around him. You hear shouting, call and then nothing, his head sank, he disappeared. The other caribou have pretended not to hear, have had nervous tremors like to hunt mosquitoes too abundant. I think they know that danger is now standing still on the ground may open under their feet and they disappear with no hope of relief. The caribou are pretending not to know.

Our small planet saw the warmest year since we are able to measure temperatures. The boreal forest burns, permafrost melts at high speed releasing billions of tons of methane much more active than the CO2 in the development of the greenhouse effect. The earth opens up beneath our feet.

Because of the current La Nina, next winter will probably be a little colder than average. This will be a good opportunity to burn more oil. The loudmouths on the radio to enjoy laughing doomsayers who talk about global warming. And we’ll pretend not to know.

Subject Category: Biogeochemistry

Soil science: Arctic thaw

Hermann F. Jungkunst is at the Institute of Geography, Landscape Ecology, University of Gottingen, Goldschmidtstrasse 5, D-37077 Gottingen, Germany.
e-mail: hjungku@gwdg.de

Abstract

The organic matter stored in frozen Arctic soils could release significant quantities of carbon dioxide and methane on thawing. Now, laboratory experiments show that re-wetting of previously thawed permafrost could increase nitrous oxide production by 20-fold.

Introduction

Arctic soils store tremendous amounts of organic matter. Over millennia, cold, wet conditions have slowed the breakdown of plant material in the Arctic, and large quantities of carbon and nitrogen have built up in permanently frozen ground — termed permafrost. Global warming threatens to thaw these frozen soils and release large quantities of methane and carbon dioxide to the atmosphere1. Nitrous oxide — another potent greenhouse gas — can also be emitted from permafrost soils, but the relationship to thawing is uncertain2. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Elberling and colleagues3 show that the addition of the original nitrogen- and carbon-rich meltwater to thawed permafrost cores, sampled from Greenland, stimulates nitrous oxide production.

Microbial breakdown of soil organic matter can produce three greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. The magnitude of emissions is not only dependent on temperature, but also on water and oxygen levels. The quality and abundance of soil organic matter — which is heterogeneously distributed in most soils — will also influence gas flux from the soil to the atmosphere.

As the Arctic climate warms, the upper, active layer of permafrost soils, which melts each summer, could thicken, facilitating the breakdown of previously frozen organic matter by soil microbes. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that newly thawed permafrost releases large volumes of methane and carbon dioxide1, 4. Furthermore, freeze–thaw cycles can promote nitrous oxide emissions5: in the Arctic, permafrost melting creates a mosaic of wet and dry soil conditions — due to small differences in topography and drainage — that favour nitrous oxide production6.

Elberling and colleagues show that the production of nitrous oxide just beneath the active layer can be extraordinarily high when permafrost soils undergo melting and subsequent re-wetting in a laboratory environment3. They examined the effect of thawing on nitrous oxide production in permafrost cores up to three metres in length, collected from a wetland site in northeastern Greenland. To mimic freeze–thaw conditions, cores were thawed, drained and subsequently re-wetted with the original meltwater, which contained high concentrations of ammonium and dissolved organic matter. Rates of nitrous oxide production were low in the frozen and thawed cores. However, there was a 20-fold increase in nitrous oxide production throughout the entire depth of the permafrost soils on re-wetting with the original meltwater; production rose to 18 μg nitrogen per hour per kg of soil. The fact that the addition of carbon- and nitrogen-rich water triggered nitrous oxide production suggests that the carbon and nitrogen cycles in these soils are tightly connected. Measurements of nitrous oxide production in permafrost soils collected from an additional five wetland sites suggest that the high rates of nitrous oxide production observed in the Greenland soils are not unique.

However, not all of the nitrous oxide produced following re-wetting will escape to the atmosphere. Some will be consumed within anoxic micro-zones in the active layer. To gauge the amount of nitrous oxide actually emitted, Elberling et al. measured nitrous oxide emissions from one of the thawed and re-wetted cores from northeast Greenland: only 31% of the nitrous oxide produced was emitted to the atmosphere, although this is still equivalent to 34 mg of nitrous oxide per square metre per day. In fact, emissions of this magnitude exceed those from bare peat patches, match most of those from highly fertilized agricultural sites, and are only beaten by emissions from highly fertilized and compacted potato fields7 (Fig. 1).

Elberling et al. examined the impact of thawing on nitrous oxide production in permafrost soils3. They found that thawing alone had little impact on nitrous oxide levels, but re-wetting with the original meltwater significantly stimulated production. Experiments on one core suggest that only a third of the nitrous oxide produced following re-wetting is released to the atmosphere. Error bars represent the standard deviation.

Of course, their findings need to be verified in the field. A key uncertainty is how plants — which compete with soil microbes for ammonium and nitrate — will influence the production and emission of nitrous oxide. Given that strong nitrous oxide emissions are found in vegetation-free patches of sub-Arctic tundra2, and that plant cover will probably increase in the Arctic region owing to rising temperatures, the impact of vegetation on nitrous oxide emissions deserves examination.

Elberling and colleagues show that nitrous oxide emissions from thawed permafrost can equal those from highly fertilized agricultural soils3. But science is not an Olympic sport, where faster, higher and longer are the only results that count. It is important, too, to understand the more subtle feedbacks, such as those between the Arctic carbon and nitrogen cycles.

A large amount of methane is bubbling up from the ocean floor east of Siberia at a surprising rate and could accelerate climate change, researchers said yesterday.

The gas is bubbling up from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf because warming ocean water is thawing permafrost, allowing methane trapped underneath to escape. The amount of methane emitted by that one patch of seabed roughly equals the amount scientists believed was released by all of the world’s oceans.

But just how the discovery will affect projections of future warming is hard to say, according to a team of scientists from the United States, Russia and Sweden who published their findings yesterday in the journal Science.

“Seabed deposits [of methane] were considered until recently to be reliably sealed by subsea permafrost,” said the study’s lead author, Natalia Shakhova of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. “But what we are having now is up to 10 million tons annually escaping from this seabed. This means permafrost does not serve as an impermeable cap or seal to prevent this leakage any longer.”

Shakhova said there is not enough information now to know whether the methane seeping up from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf — which covers more than 810,000 square miles — signals the emergence of a significant new source of the potent greenhouse gas. Methane is regarded as 20 to 30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Uncertainty over whether the release will grow

Information she and her colleagues gathered during multiple research expeditions between 2003 and 2008 suggest that the area, home to 100 methane “hot spots,” emits 8 million metric tons of the gas into the atmosphere.

That’s a relatively small slice of the 440 million metric tons of methane emitted worldwide each year from a combination of human activities and natural sources like rotting plants in wetlands, termites and wildfires.

But Shakhova pointed out that scientists had not thought subsea permafrost would begin to thaw and release the gas. She said more research is needed to figure out whether the methane leaking from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is an ongoing, steady phenomenon, or whether it suggests a new source of the gas is emerging as seafloor permafrost thaws.

Water over the Siberian site averages minus 1.8 to 1 degree Celsius, 12 to 17 degrees warmer than the air that helps permafrost on land stay frozen.

Martin Heimann, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, said the amount of methane now escaping there is “negligible,” though that could change.

“Will this persist into the future under sustained warming trends?” he said in a commentary published in Science. “We do not know.”

Warming rivers melt the permafrost

News of methane escaping at the Siberian site follows a similar report last year, when British researchers said they found 250 plumes of methane rising from the seafloor in the Barents Sea north of Norway.

Speaking with reporters yesterday, Shakhova said it appears that river runoff flowing into the area she studied is getting warmer and raising the temperature of water near the ocean floor, where the permafrost lies.

She also noted that water over the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is unusually shallow, with an average depth of just 148 feet. That means the methane that escapes from the ocean floor has little chance of dissolving or oxidizing as it rises to the sea surface.

“It just escapes,” she said.

Source Scientific America

“Our results suggest that degradation of subsea permafrost in the ESAS currently very likely occurs on a wider scale than was previously thought,” Natalia Shakhova toldenvironmentalresearchweb. “Specifically, it was [previously] considered that in the areas of the ESAS shallower than 60–70 metres subsea permafrost is stable, continuous and impermeable for gases. We have shown that areas of the ESAS affected by thermokarst [permafrost melting], submerged taliks and some other processes could serve as migration pathways for methane to escape to the water column and further to the atmosphere.”

The permafrost beneath the Laptev Sea in the Dmitry Laptev Strait has experienced many changes in sea level, becoming terrestrial for some periods of its lifetime; it was last inundated about 7000–8000 years ago to a maximum depth of around 15 metres. This resulted in an increase in average temperature of the permafrost from around –17 °C to just below freezing. The team believes that global climate change has caused additional warming to the subsea permafrost by raising the temperature of river run-off entering the ocean. The permafrost is also experiencing geothermal heating from the rift zone below.

Shakhova and Nicolsky believe that the development of open taliks – unfrozen regions – in the permafrost at sites where thaw lakes and river palaeo valleys were submerged is enabling methane to escape.

“Generally speaking, destabilization of subsea permafrost means that it fails to further prevent methane leakage from seabed deposits of methane stored in the ESAS,” said Shakhova. “This provides the global carbon budget with a previously unconsidered and very specific type of methane source.”

Unlike other terrestrial and marine sources, which gradually release methane as it forms, the shelf is emitting methane that has accumulated in seabed deposits for hundreds of thousands of years and until now was restricted by permafrost, says Shakhova.

“As methane has been permanently originating in the seabed since it was formed, these deposits are huge and emissions of this ready-to-go methane to the water column only depend on occurence of migration pathways (provided or not provided by permafrost),” she said. “These emissions could be non-gradual, sudden, more or less massive, they could even be abrupt.”

The methane released from ESAS does not become oxidized by microbes as it passes through the water column, unlike methane released from the oceanic hydrate deposits found at depths of more than 700 m. “In the ESAS this bio-filter does not work because the water is very shallow – mean depth is less than 50 m – and there is just not enough time for oxidation,” said Shakhova.

“Moreover, Arctic shallow hydrate deposits are three times more sensitive to warming than oceanic deposits,” said Shakhova. “This means that three times less energy (provided by warming) is required to destabilize them compared to deep oceanic hydrates.”

Now the researchers, who reported their work inEnvironmental Research Letters, plan to model further the current state of subsea permafrost over the entire area of the ESAS using their original multi-year data on sea bottom temperatures and some additional data.

Source Environmental Research

March 21, 2010  |  Scott Thill – Alternet

And if the ground’s not cold/Everything is gonna burn/We’ll all take turns/I’ll get mine too. — Pixies, “Monkey Gone to Heaven.” 

Bad news. Thanks to perfectly timed, premeditated reality assassinations like so-called ClimateGate, nearly half of Americans may now believe that the various threats of climate change are exaggerated. That’s the highest quotient ever since polling on the issue commenced. But there is good news: They’re on the wrong side of history and science, and Earth will still get the last laugh on all of them, and us for that matter.

Welcome to our existential nightmare. From rising seas and runaway droughts and storms to the outer limits of dystopian catastrophes like the fart apocalypse — I’ll explain later — our planet has no shortage of ways to bitch-slap us back into our dangerous reality, whether we want it to or not.

Of course, we could stave off some of the more egregious probabilities of extinction, if we acted now to limit global warming’s inexorable rise to 2 degrees. But that means a determined destruction of the status quo, and that’s always messy for those who like things just the way they are, thank you very much. But they’ll still get theirs. How? Let us count the ways.

1. Envirogees: If you’re one of those righteously indignant climate change deniers who also hates immigration, you’re in for a world of hurt. According to scientists and scholars, climate refugees could hit 50 million this year and explode to 150 million over the next 50. Hordes of these envirogees, as I call them, will be turned out of their environmentally sensitive homes in China, India, the United States and elsewhere.

They will doubtless end up in the backyards of disgruntled citizens who like to mumble or scream about things they won’t settle for in their backyards. If you think immigration is a problem now, just wait until Mother Earth starts cleaning house.

2. Dead Zones: Deniers might like to point out that hypoxic oceans and lakes, known as dead zones in ecological parlance, could be just as attributable to overpopulation as to global warming. Whatever. Their increased frequency is making climate change worse, no matter the prime cause, as if there could ever be such a thing. From shrinking the sex organs of our planet’s fish to fucking up its food chain and escalating the ocean’s nitrous oxide emissions, dead zones are deep threats.

More nitrous oxide, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, means more ozone depletion, which means more cancer, crop depletion and much worse.

3. Rising Tides: Of course, most deniers, especially those who live near oceans, probably won’t be worrying about their chemical content once catastrophic climate change’s more severe symptoms arrive. They’ll be too busy fleeing the rising tide.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report prophesied that global warming would increase sea levels by 190-580 millimeters by 2100. More recent research has doubled the bar to an upper limit of two meters. Which probably means that in another few years, the already catastrophic limit will be raised again, perhaps by another 100 percent, at which point there won’t be much point in measuring anything at all. Coastal metropoles like Los Angeles, Miami, London, Sydney and others will literally be drowning in data.

It’s an object lesson in ironic reversal: ClimateGate deniers were partially right about the IPCC’s projections, although they were wrong in thinking they were too severe. In fact, they were too conservative.

4. Fart Apocalypse! The hits just keep on coming, when it comes to global warming and the oceans. Take methane, for example, which like nitrous oxide is a killer greenhouse gas. Plus, it smells terrible, like someone took a crap right in your head.

Now imagine being choked by it, as it is belched from the oceans in a toxic feedback loop and dominates the atmosphere. It’s probably happened before in one or more of a variety of extinction events like the Permian-Triassic, more scarily known as the Great Dying. But it could be happening again, as the permafrost melts and farts methane into the ocean and thereby the sky.

According to recent science, atmospheric methane has steadily risen each year since 2007, and whether it’s factory farming of beef or melting permafrost, the threat remains the same. Earth has serious gas, and it’s not afraid to use it. Hey, at least it’s not hydrogen sulfide, an extinction executioner you’ll never smell coming. Methane has the decency to stink up your nose and future.

5. Droughts and Desertfication: Sure, flooded cities and fart Armageddons are flashier than drying croplands, but the latter is a clear and present danger while the former are still future catastrophes waiting to strike.

Drought and desertification are surely the least glamorous ravages of global warming, but they are immediate. Parched rivers and declining precipitation, especially in once-fertile regions in America, India, China, Africa and elsewhere, are fueling everything from crop failure to gender inequality and “famine marriages.” Drought news has eased somewhat, thanks to recent record-breaking storms and freezes that have balanced water accounts for some regions, especially in the United States. But if you think climate change is going to bring more water your way instead of less, I’ve got a subprime condo in Australia I’d like to sell you. It’s hot!

6. Ice Age Cometh? Deniers love the aforementioned record-breaking storms, because it’s hard for their tiny brains to comprehend that catastrophic climate change could simultaneously feature both deep freezes and ferocious firestorms. (They just can’t figure out why snow won’t make the words “global warming” go away.) The first decade of this still-new century was the hottest on record, yet our recent winter was wetter and colder than average. That dynamic flux is central to global warming, at least for now, as changing atmospheric flows remake the environmental map of the world. What we end up with once the new normal settles down, no one really knows.

In fact, it could be another ice age, at least for some parts of the world endangered by disruptions in thermohaline circulation and other possibilities. It happened after the Medieval Warm Period, and it can happen again. Which means that deniers pointing to deep freezes as evidence against global warming might be frozen before they realize how wrong they are. Oh well.

7. Deforest Dystopia: What’s as bad as global carbon dioxide emissions from planes, trains and automobiles? Deforestation, which accounts for around 20 percent of the CO2, currently at an all-time high, belched into the air every year. Cutting down forests, which are carbon sinks, in order to build wood and paper crap like the Wall Street Journal that we’re just going to throw away and burn into the atmosphere later is an unclassifiable kind of dumb.

Yet we do it every year, to our own detriment. Our rampant hyperconsumption and half-hearted conservation efforts have endangered the billion or so of us that perennially live off of forests. At best, we could kill off our great forests, as well as our way of life. At worst, climate change turns trees from carbon sinks to emitters, without looking back. And then deniers truly won’t be able to see the forests for the trees, because there won’t be any left.

8. Magnetic Mourning: Genius cosmologist Stephen Hawking once publicly worried that runaway greenhouse gases could eventually turn our verdant Earth into the celestial hellhole known as Venus. But what probably helped turn a once-oceanic Venus into that hellhole is a relative lack of a magnetic field, like the one we have on Earth that shields us from the sun’s interstellar ferocity. But for how long?

As recently discovered, Earth’s protective magnetic field is 250 million years olderthan previously thought. Now a ripe age of 3.5 billion years, our magnetic field could be weakening, and that weakening could turn us into Mars, not Venus, or even lead to the type of geomagnetic reversal that terrorized audiences in Roland Emmerich’s disaster porn movie, 2012.

What’s this got to do with global warming? Well, that depends on who you talk to. Some scientists believe that an already weakening magnetic field is causing global warming, but it’s probably only a matter of time before that arrangement is flipped. Fucking with a planet’s stable temperature and atmospheric flows tends to encourage these things. Who knows what that’s doing to the Earth’s core? Who wants to find out?

9. Give Us Demographics or Give Us Death! Tired of the bring-downs? Cheer up, pal! Demographics, not just facts, could be against the deniers as well. The median age of network and cable viewers grows older by the year, as those outlets decide to either avoid covering global warming or, like Fox News, glorify the deniers.

Even U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu admits the denier campaigns are led by global warming’s future losers, who will eventually have to bow to reality. Last year, ad revenue for newspapers and networks continued to decline, while it increased online, where the diversity of opinion and information on matters of great importance like global warming is much greater.

Only Fox News managed to stave off the old media bloodbath, but its viewers are continually dumber than everyone else. The trend is obvious: The more global warming wears on, the more evidence for its ascendancy piles up, and the more skeptics, graying and irrelevant, fall by the wayside. Now that climate-change believers in the White House are teaming up with Hollywood to spread the word, you can practically hear the skeptics aging by the minute.

10. Cosmological Constant: The list above is compelling enough to convince you that deniers are dancing on the graves of their reputations, to say nothing of reality itself. But we science-minded world citizens share one major commonality with them: The planet will probably outlive us both, no matter what happens.

In a billion years, the sun’s luminosity will likely increase, stripping Earth of its oceans and vegetation. By then, one can hope we have evolved enough to realize that no intelligent design can save us, that we’re lucky to be spinning on a green and blue rock through the void of space. If we do, it’s likely we’ll have worked out a way to migrate to a more suitable planet and save our sorry hides. But that would mean getting through less existentially obvious hoops like global warming, which isn’t currently going so great.

It’s just a question of time, which is ridiculous if you think about it: We wouldn’t even understand time were it not for the gravitational ballet of our solar system. But here we are, at the dawn of the 21st century, trying to avoid the revelation that we are not God’s lucky children, but Earth’s lucky children, and we should be taking much better care of our sandbox. Or else.

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In recent years scientists have learned that liquid water lurks under much of Antarctica’s massive ice sheet, and so, they say, the potential microbial habitat in this watery world is huge. If the methane produced by the bacteria gets trapped beneath the ice and builds up over long periods of time — a possibility that is far from certain — it could mean that as ice sheets melt under warmer temperatures, they would release large amounts of heat-trapping methane gas.

Jemma Wadham, a geochemist at the University of Bristol in England, described the little-known role of methane-making microbes, called methanogens, below ice sheets on March 15 at an American Geophysical Union conference on Antarctic lakes.

Her team took samples from one site in Antarctica, the Lower Wright glacier, and one in Greenland, the Russell glacier. Trapped within the ice were high concentrations of methane, Wadham said, as well as methanogens themselves — up to 10 million cells per gram in the Antarctic sample and 100,000 cells per gram in Greenland. That’s comparable to the concentration of methanogens found in deep-ocean sediments, she said. The species of microbes were also similar to those found in other polar environments, such as Arctic peat or tundra.

The team then put scrapings from both sites into bottles and incubated them with water to see which microbes might grow. For the Antarctic samples, Wadham said, “nothing happens for 250 days and then bam! You get tons of methane.” The Greenland samples haven’t been growing for as long and so far don’t show much signs of giving off methane — but perhaps they just need more time, she reported at the meeting.

Other researchers have also recently found methanogens in icy settings. Mark Skidmore, a microbiologist at Montana State University in Bozeman, reported at the conference that his team has found methanogens in the Robertson glacier in the Canadian Rockies. “It underscores the importance of subglacial methanogenesis,” Skidmore said.

The studies flesh out a picture of Antarctica as a much more dynamic and watery environment than the frozen, static one once envisaged. At least 386 lakes have been identified buried beneath the ice sheet, scientists from the University of Edinburgh reported at the meeting. Plans for major drilling projects are underway for several of them.

Images: 1) NASA. 2) Zina Deretsky/NSF. 

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“In that 70 percent or so of the world’s surface—oceans that we have been tampering with by warming, Mother Nature’s effervescence, ‘Bubbles,’ has been working on a fermentation process. She got the idea from Schweppes. Her marketing department is working on a catch phrase. On the table for consideration at present are ‘Bubbles stored for your life,’ ‘Bubbles borrowed direct from Nature to you’ and ‘Bubbles brewed for Millennia.’ She, Mother Nature, has had a couple of product test runs with surprising results.”

“Around 251 million years ago at the end of what’s called the Permian period, product trials came close to wiping out all life on Earth. More than 94 percent of the marine species present in fossil records disappeared suddenly as oxygen levels plummeted and life teetered on the verge of extinction. Over the next 500,000 years, a few species struggled to regain a foothold. It took 20 to 30 million years for even the most rudimentary coral reefs to re-establish themselves and for forests to regrow. In some areas, it took more than 100 million years for ecosystems to reach their former healthy biodiversity. We weren’t around at the time or even during the next failed product launch about 55 million years ago in what geologists now call the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM for short. This managed massive die-offs and disrupted the climate for a little over 100,000 years. Now, the weather plays a big part in these product launches, just ask Fosters. They sell a lot more cold beer in the warmer months. So as we get back up there to the right level, she is ready for another try. This time though, she has a bigger target market, you and me. Unlike the closely guarded secret formula for Coke, some have taken a look at the ingredients and given it the name Clathrates. The formula is made up of naturally occurring greenhouse gases trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern mud and at the bottom of the seas. Mother Nature’s special herbs and spices contain the all important ingredient, methane. Unlike those in her under-story in the Siberian and Alaskan permafrost, these are secured by either intense cold (pause for a moment—Arctic water now warming at 3 times the global average) or in the deep oceans under high pressure. Just a reminder—now warming to a depth of 3 kilometers. A few years back a palaeoceanographer called Gerald Dickens was (ironically) trying to assist our friends in the oil industry. While working for the University of Michigan, on a drilling expedition he had a drill pipe explode dramatically with the internal pressure build-up of methane, shooting mud 50 meters skyward. Quite simple for ‘Bubbles’ really, unlike an ice cube harmlessly melting (unless you’re the size of the Ross Ice Shelf), in the case of frozen methane it doesn’t change from ice to water, it changes from ice to gas. Indeed gas that is twenty to twenty-four times as potent as CO₂ as a greenhouse gas. Put another way, 1 cubic metre of ‘Bubbles’ clathrates brought to the surface releases 164 cubic meters of methane. Now when ‘Bubbles’ lets a few go, it can be a bit like an underwater flare that triggers more ‘Bubbles’ in the area. And before you know it the flame-like flare (like a gas flare on an offshore oil rig) under the right conditions can set off a chain reaction. The old ripple in the pond trick. This though, the theory goes, turned from a ripple in the pond to more like a deep sea nuclear holocaust in the case of the incident 251 million years ago and may have been more like a couple of dozen Hiroshimas in the incident 55 million years ago. To get the whole product launch going again might seem like a long-term project, unless she tries a couple of market tests in the now nearly ice-free Arctic. Estimates of Mother Nature’s store room in Davey Jones’s locker, are at best guess between 1 and 10 trillion tonnes—nobody is really sure at this stage, it’s a big ocean. There are a couple of other possibilities for the launch but at this time, it’s just a guess. On the basis of a very large and mostly uninhabited area of 71 percent of the planet, and with that 3 kilometers of warming going on, might it just be possible that one or two minor ‘bubbles’ would get the chance to be released? Might it even have, or be happening right now? Why do we ask this question? Throughout history, at least as ‘best available science’ suggests, when this sort of event takes place the oceans suddenly turn acidic as vast amounts of carbon dioxide dissolve into the surrounding waters, killing fish and other marine life. Have we not seen such occurrences of late, mass fish die-offs along coastlines and in open oceans from the Caribbean to the Baltic, from Scotland to New Zealand and Australia? Since first recorded in 1970 ocean dead zones have been on a dramatic increase, doubling in each decade from recorded areas in the 90’s to 150 in 2003, some stretching 70,000 square kilometers. The United Nations reports over the following two years 2003–2005 estimates were of 200. In 2008 the reported figure was 417 worldwide. And could this ripple effect be three-dimensional?”

End excerpt.

Many other tipping points both in the natural systems now being disrupted by climate change and by the perpetuation of our living and business as usual lives are also foreshadowed within the pages of the book. Maybe now would be a good time to get yourself a copy HERE.

Climate scientists have long warned that global warming could unlock vast stores of the greenhouse gas methane that are frozen into the Arctic permafrost, setting off potentially significant increases in global warming.
Now researchers at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and elsewhere say this change is under way in a little-studied area under the sea, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, west of the Bering Strait.
Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the university and a leader of the study, said it was too soon to say whether the findings suggest that a dangerous release of methane looms. In a telephone news conference, she said researchers were only beginning to track the movement of this methane into the atmosphere as the undersea permafrost that traps it degrades.
But climate experts familiar with the new research reported in Friday’s issue of the journalScience that even though it does not suggest imminent climate catastrophe, it is important because of methane’s role as a greenhouse gas. Although carbon dioxide is far more abundant and persistent in the atmosphere, ton for ton atmospheric methane traps at least 25 times as much heat.
Until recently, undersea permafrost has been little studied, but work so far shows it is already sending surprising amounts of methane into the atmosphere, Dr. Shakhova and other researchers are finding.
Last year, scientists from Britain and Germany reported that they had detected plumes of methane rising from the Arctic seabed in the West Spitsbergen area, north of Scandinavia. At the time, they said they had begun their work hoping to gain data to predict future emissions and had not expected to find evidence that the process was under way.
It is “indispensable” to keep track of methane in the region, Martin Heimann of the Max Planck Institute in Germany said in a commentary accompanying the Science report. So far, Dr. Heimann wrote, methane contributions from Arctic permafrost have been “negligible.” He added: “But will this persist into the future under sustained warming trends? We do not know.”
In an e-mail message, Euan G. Nisbet of the University of London, an expert on atmospheric methane, said the situation “needs to be watched carefully.”
Atmospheric concentrations of methane have more than doubled since pre-industrial times, Dr. Heimann wrote. Most of it comes from human activities including energy production, cattle raising and the cultivation of rice. But about 40 percent is natural, including the decomposition of organic materials in wetlands and frozen wetlands like permafrost.
Dr. Shakhova said that permafrost in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, peat land that flooded as sea levels rose after the last ice age, is degrading in part because runoff from rivers that feed the Arctic Ocean is warmer than in the past.
She estimated that annual methane emissions from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf total about seven teragrams. (A teragram is 1.1 million tons.) By some estimates, global methane emissions total about 500 teragrams a year.
Dr. Shakhova said that undersea methane ordinarily undergoes oxidation as it rises to the surface, where it is released as carbon dioxide. But because water over the shelf is at most about 50 meters deep, she said, the gas bubbles to the surface there as methane. As a result, she said, atmospheric levels of methane over the Arctic are 1.85 parts per million, almost three times as high as the global average of 0.6 or 0.7 parts per million. Concentrations over the shelf are 2 parts per million or higher.
But, “I am not the person to judge” whether the Arctic findings suggest that estimates of climate change in coming decades should be rewritten, she added.
“I would not go so far as to suggest any implications,” she said. “We are at the very beginning of research.”

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Methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon, is spewing from what was believed to be an impermeable barrier in Siberia in amounts equal to methane releases from the world’s oceans. The discovery has lead researchers to fear the possibility of abrupt climate warming. According to the study published in Science, subsea permafrost below the East Siberian Arctic Shelf has become compromised, leaking vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere.

The researchers have estimated that 6.5 to 10 teragrams of methane is emitted from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf every year: one teragram equals about 1.1 million tons. However, researchers are particularly worried about the amount of methane that could be released in the future.
“Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already,” explains lead author Natalia Shakhova, a researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbank’s International Arctic Research Center. “If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger.”

Since the methane is stored below the sea, the release of the potent greenhouse gas has the capacity of being far larger and quicker than methane released by thawing permafrost on land. In a podcast Shakhova compared the methane built up beneath the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost to a bottle of champagne: in other words if an opening occurs in the permafrost vast stores of methane could be abruptly released into the atmosphere much like a cork being popped.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is 50 meters in depth or less: due to its shallowness in the shelf has been both submerged under the seawater and exposed depending on climate conditions during Earth’s past. During cold periods, the shelf would remain frozen and not leak methane. However, as global temperatures warm and sea levels rise, the shallow shelf is flooded with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the air temperature, leading to compromise of the permafrost and possible methane-release.

“It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen,” Shakhova said. “Nobody considered this huge area.”

Shakhova points out that in Earth’s geological record atmospheric methane concentrations have been between 0.3 to 0.4 parts per million in cold periods to 0.6 to 0.7 parts per million in warm periods. Yet, today, current average methane concentrations globally are 1.7 parts per million, more than double the average in warm periods. In the Arctic that average jumps to 1.85 parts per million: the highest concentration in 400,000 years. Yet, methane measurements above the East Siberian Arctic shelf are 10 percent higher. According to measurements 50 percent of the surface water in the area is supersaturated with methane and 80 percent of the deep water.

If the methane were being released in deep water, it would oxidize before reaching the surface and become carbon dioxide. However, since the East Siberian Arctic shelf is so shallow, this oxidization doesn’t occur and the gas enters the atmosphere as the far more potent methane.

“The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to 3 to 4 times,” Shakhova concludes, adding that “the climatic consequences of this are hard to predict.”

Source

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The reality of that welcome to us would be our reply, “I’m not getting on this flight!”

Yet we are all in fact on that flight with climate change and the plane has taken off.

Much has been promoted in the media lately that climate change science is somehow conspiring to concoct data and the conspiracy theories abound from ‘Climate Gate’ and timeframes for the disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas. There has been little said to the fact that the glaciers in the Himalayas will in fact disappear. This is a forgone conclusion with climate change. That plane will crash. As we watch impassively at the Arctic thaw and the recent reports of glacial melt and iceshelf collapse in Antarctica, we can see too that this plane is flying on one engine. As we observe species extinction reports and look at the lonely figure of the polar bear on the ever shrinking ice flows that they depend on for their very existence, we can see their plane has crashed and is slowly going down.

There is accelerated thawing of the permafrost in northern latitudes with recent observations of methane emissions being on a dramatic rise adding further to the possibility that this climatic tipping point has been breached. That plane is on vertical takeoff.

The Foundations main mission is ‘To broaden the understanding of the choices made that impact or increase depletion of finite resources resulting in environmental and ecosystem damage.’ Enshrined in this environmental educational message is environmental and ecosystem damage, so climate change as a direct result of our unsustainable consumption of finite fossil fuels with the resultant pollution of our atmosphere daily of heat trapping greenhouse gases is a part of that massage. This plane also will crash unless we take some immediate action to perform some maintenance. Would you get on that plane if no maintenance had been carried out since it was commissioned?

In the last six months or so, while still reporting the observed effects of climate change that are coming daily, much to the surprise of the scientific community ahead of the date they thought those changes might occur, we have moved the messages more to inevitable finite resource extinction. Yes extinction; because just like the polar bear with climate change and its ecosystem damage, our future relies as much on sustainable resource consumption as theirs does on ice flows. And there is a certainty that can be predicted when this will happen. Maybe we can’t get people to think of the impact their actions today will have on their children and grandchildren in 100 years time when the climate change plane inevitably crashes, but within my lifetime and yours the plane of consumption you and I are sitting on will crash.

Consumption Airlines will crash and it’s time we all thought about getting off the plane. Check the back of your ticket, it’s written there in plain language. If you need further convincing, then see the simple math of when.

Anyway should scientists have to give us the date that the plane will crash? They know it will; it’s only when the impact will take place that is in doubt.

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