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by Luther Blissett » Mon Mar 09, 2015 2:40 pm
by Iamwhomiam » Mon Mar 09, 2015 2:55 pm
Luther Blissett » Mon Mar 09, 2015 2:38 pm wrote:Given that the Lykov family went 40 years without contacting another outside human in a rural Russian area much further to the south than the Arctic Circle, I bet there are plenty of craters that have gone completely undetected.
by stillrobertpaulsen » Fri Mar 27, 2015 8:50 pm
by zangtang » Sat Mar 28, 2015 9:50 am
by stillrobertpaulsen » Sat Mar 28, 2015 11:36 pm
Vast methane 'plumes' seen in Arctic ocean as sea ice retreats
Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.
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.
"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," he said.
Scientists estimate that there are hundreds of millions of tons of methane gas locked away beneath the Arctic permafrost, which extends from the mainland into the seabed of the relatively shallow sea of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.
One of the greatest fears is that with the disappearance of the Arctic sea ice in summer, and rapidly rising temperatures across the entire Arctic region, which are already melting the Siberian permafrost, the trapped methane could be suddenly released into the atmosphere leading to rapid and severe climate change.
Dr Semiletov's team published a study in 2010 estimating that the methane emissions from this region were in the region of 8 million tons a year but the latest expedition suggests this is a significant underestimate of the true scale of the phenomenon.
In late summer, the Russian research vessel Academician Lavrentiev conducted an extensive survey of about 10,000 square miles of sea off the East Siberian coast, in cooperating with the University of Georgia Athens. Scientists deployed four highly sensitive instruments, both seismic and acoustic, to monitor the "fountains" or plumes of methane bubbles rising to the sea surface from beneath the seabed.
"In a very small area, less than 10,000 square miles, we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed," Dr Semiletov said.
"We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale - I think on a scale not seen before. Some of the plumes were a kilometre or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere - the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal," he said.
Dr Semiletov released his findings for the first time last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. He is now preparing the study for publication in a scientific journal.
The total amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is calculated to be greater than the overall quantity of carbon locked up in global coal reserves so there is intense interest in the stability of these deposits as the polar region warms at a faster rate than other places on earth.
Natalia Shakhova, a colleague at the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said that the Arctic is becoming a major source of atmospheric methane and the concentrations of the powerful greenhouse gas have risen dramatically since pre-industrial times, largely due to agriculture.
However, with the melting of Arctic sea ice and permafrost, the huge stores of methane that have been locked away underground for many thousands of years might be released over a relatively short period of time, Dr Shakhova said.
"I am concerned about this process, I am really concerned. But no-one can tell the timescale of catastrophic releases. There is a probability of future massive releases might occur within the decadal scale, but to be more accurate about how high that probability is, we just don't know," Dr Shakova said.
"Methane released from the Arctic shelf deposits contributes to global increase and the best evidence for that is the higher concentration of atmospheric methane above the Arctic Ocean," she said.
"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, and this has never happened in the history of the planet," she added.
Each methane molecule is about 70 times more potent in terms of trapping heat than a molecule of carbon dioxide. However, because methane it broken down more rapidly in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, scientist calculate that methane is about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a hundred-year cycle.
by Iamwhomiam » Sun Mar 29, 2015 2:06 pm
by Iamwhomiam » Sun Mar 29, 2015 2:49 pm
zangtang » Sat Mar 28, 2015 9:50 am wrote:mentioned elsewhere (cant find it on this thread) that i expect the methane craters 'story' to be quietly shuffled to the side and buried.......
- dont know how you censor or 'cover up' something thats already out, but i suspect that because its so impactful and visual
(OMG the fucking ground is EXPLODING!!!) this has the power to disrupt our comatose somnambulism.........
I'm beginning to suspect the plan is to distract and entertain us to death, leave the global martial law thing till the latest
possible moment.
light and fluffy...........
StillRobertPaulson wrote,
Yeah, I think it was the New York Times as well as WaPo that had an "alternate explanation" to sow doubt.
by stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Mar 30, 2015 4:23 pm
by Iamwhomiam » Mon Mar 30, 2015 5:07 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Apr 01, 2015 8:55 pm
The Arctic climate threat that nobody’s even talking about yet
By Chris Mooney April 1 at 11:02 AM
This undated handout photo provided by the University of Florida, shows the Noatak National Preserve in Alaska with erosion and ground degradation because permafrost is thawing more from global warming. (AP Photo/Edward Schuur, University of Florida)
When we think about the Arctic in a warming world, we tend to think about sharp declines in sea ice and — that powerful symbol — the polar bear. But that’s far from the only problem that a melting Arctic brings.
In the past decade, scientists have been training more attention on another deeply troubling consequence. Rapid Arctic warming is expected to lead to the thawing of a great deal of frozen soil or permafrost, which, as it thaws, will begin to emit carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere. And if this occurs in the amounts that some scientists are predicting, it could significantly undermine efforts to reduce the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Indeed, scientists have discovered a simple statistic that underscores the scale of the potential problem: There may be more than twice as much carbon contained in northern permafrost as there is in the atmosphere itself. That’s a staggering thought.
Permafrost is simply defined as ground that stays frozen all year round. There’s a lot of it – it covers 24 percent of the surface of the northern hemisphere land masses, according to the International Permafrost Association. But more and more of it is thawing as the Arctic warms, and these frozen soils contain a vast amount of organic material — largely dead plant life — in a kind of suspended animation.
“It’s built up over thousand and thousands of years,” says Robert Max Holmes, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. “It’s all stored away in a freezer, and as we’re warming the Earth, and warming the Arctic, it’s starting to thaw.”
As permafrost thaws, microbes start to chow down on the organic material that it contains, and as that material decomposes, it emits either carbon dioxide or methane. Experts think most of the release will take the form of carbon dioxide — the chief greenhouse gas driving global warming — but even a small fraction released as methane can have major consequences. Although it doesn’t last nearly as long as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, methane has a short-term warming effect that is many times more powerful.
Among the potential mega-problems brought on by climate change, including melting ice caps to the slowdown of the ocean conveyor system, permafrost emissions are unique. For it’s not merely about sea level rise or weather changes — it’s about amplifying the root problem behind it all, atmospheric carbon levels.
The emission of carbon from thawing permafrost is what scientists call a “positive feedback.” More global warming could cause more thawing of Arctic permafrost, leading to more emissions of carbon into the atmosphere, leading to more warming and more thawing of Arctic permafrost — this does not end in a good place.
In this Aug. 10, 2009, photo, a hill of permafrost “slumping” from global warming near the remote, boggy fringe of North America, 2,200 kilometers (1,400 miles) from the North Pole, where researchers are learning more about methane seeps in the 25,000 lakes of this vast Mackenzie River Delta, in the Northwest Territories, Canada.(AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Moreover, in a year in which the world will train its attention on Paris and the hope for a new global climate agreement, permafrost emissions could potentially undermine global climate policies. Even as the world starts to cut back on emissions, the planet itself might start replacing our emissions cuts with brand new carbon outputs.
All of this, and the Arctic permafrost problem hasn’t received much attention — yet. “The concept is actually relatively new,” says Kevin Schaefer of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “It was first proposed in 2005. And the first estimates came out in 2011.” Indeed, the problem is so new that it has not yet made its way into major climate projections, Schaefer says.
“None of the climate projections in the last IPCC report account for permafrost,” says Schaefer. “So all of them underestimate, or are biased low.”
To understand why northern soils contain so much carbon it helps to understand why southern or tropical soils don’t. It all comes down to temperature, and how that affects how quickly microorganisms break down dead organic material (plant and animal life), causing it to release its carbon back into the atmosphere.
In temperate latitudes, it’s simple: Plants grow and pull carbon dioxide from the air — then they die, decompose and emit it back again. “In warmer temperatures, microbial activity will go on over all of the year,” says Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost researcher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. “So even if productivity in warmer climates [is] larger, there’s not much sequestration of carbon in the soil.”
But in permafrost regions, it’s very different. Plants grow much more slowly, and there are fewer of them — but their decomposition is also much slower, explains Romanovsky. So a large amount of organic material gets stored in the frozen ground. And this has been happening, in some cases, over tens of thousands of years since the last ice age, leading to a truly vast carbon store that is stuck in place — or, at least, it used to be.
“As long as the carbon stays frozen in permafrost, it’s stable,” says Schaefer. “It’s kind of like broccoli in your freezer. But if you take that out, it eventually thaws out and goes bad.”
The problem, in this case, is the size of the freezer. Just consider some basic numbers. According to a 2013 report from the National Academy of Sciences, northern permafrost contains 1,700 to 1,850 gigatons of carbon — a gigaton is a billion metric tons — which is more than double the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere (730 gigatons, says the NAS). And over 1,000 of those gigatons are thought to be stored in the top three meters of permafrost soil.
Nobody’s saying all of that is going to come out — certainly not immediately, and maybe not ever. However, as the Arctic continues to warm over the course of the century, emissions from permafrost could ramp up, and they could eventually reach a scale that could begin to offset climate gains.
For instance, the United Nations Environment Programme recently found that as the world shifted from 8.5 percent renewable energy generation to 9.1 percent from 2013 to 2014, about 1.3 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide were consequently kept out of the atmosphere. But permafrost emissions could erase such progress.
“It’s certainly not much of a stretch of the imagination to think that over the coming decades, we could lose a couple of gigatons per year from thawing permafrost,” says Holmes.
So far, permafrost emissions, if any, are pretty small. But by 2100, the “mean” estimate for total emissions from permafrost right now is 120 gigatons, says Schaefer — no small matter when the International Energy Agency suggests the world can only emit about 1,000 more gigatons in total if we want to stay within a safe range of warming.
But there’s also a very large range to the permafrost emissions estimate and a lot of uncertainty, because this is a relatively new area of study. In short: It could be worse.
The world has been focused on some Arctic emissions problems lately that sound a lot like the thawing permafrost emissions problem, but should probably be distinguished from it. For instance, there is the concern about weird craters that have been found in northern Siberia, and the idea that these might be the result of methane explosions from permafrost.
A crater in the permafrost sits about 18 miles from a huge gas field north of Salekhard in Russia’s Yamalo-Nenets region last June. (AFP Photo/HO/Press service of the governor of the Yamalo-Nenets region)
While there’s still debate over how the craters were formed, though, it’s not clear that we’re talking about the same phenomenon. One reason? The craters are very far to the north in the area around the Yamal Peninsula, and that’s not where the thawing permafrost emissions problem is expected to first emerge. Rather, it should be the opposite — at the southern rim of where permafrost is found.
“The further south you go, the warmer it is, so the more vulnerable the permafrost is to thawing,” says Schaefer. “So all the emissions will be dominated by the southern margins, southern Alaska, Hudson Bay.”
Nonetheless, the craters have gotten vastly more media attention — because they’re mysterious, and because they’re thought to reflect dramatic methane explosions. But ultimately, the steady, long-term problem of carbon loss from permafrost may be scarier.
Later this month — on April 24 — the United States takes over the chairmanship of the Arctic Council, a group of eight nations with Arctic territories that helps to coordinate policy for the region. The State Department has specifically indicated that one of the focuses of the two-year chairmanship will be the issue of climate change. So, will permafrost emissions enter into policy considerations?
“This is a dangerous feedback loop as Arctic warming drives permafrost thaw, and the permafrost releases more GHGs into the atmosphere, accelerating change,” said a State Department official. “However, many questions remain about the processes by and time scales over which such emissions could be released into the atmosphere.”
The official said that through the Arctic Council, the United States will emphasize better monitoring and observation systems to detect emissions from permafrost. But the officials also underscored the importance of “an ambitious international climate agreement in Paris – this is where we need action to slow climate change.”
The concern is whether such an agreement will arrive soon enough to stop or at least blunt the permafrost problem. It’s “a true climatic tipping point, because it’s completely irreversible,” says Schaefer. “Once you thaw the permafrost, there’s no way to refreeze it.”
by stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Apr 08, 2015 8:41 pm
Scientists predict gradual, prolonged permafrost greenhouse gas emissions
A new scientific synthesis suggests a gradual, prolonged release of greenhouse gases from permafrost soils in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, which may afford society more time to adapt to environmental changes, say scientists in an April 9 paper published in Nature.
"Twenty years ago there was very little research about the possible rate of permafrost carbon release," said co-author A. David McGuire, U.S. Geological Survey senior scientist and climate modeling expert with the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "In 2011, we assembled an international team of scientists into the Permafrost Carbon Network to synthesize existing research and answer the questions of how much permafrost carbon is out there, how vulnerable to decomposition it is once it's thawed, and what are the forms in which it's released into the atmosphere."
Permafrost soils contain twice as much carbon as there is currently in the atmosphere. As the climate warms and permafrost thaws, microbial breakdown of organic carbon increases and can accelerate the release of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere creating even more warming. In high-latitude regions of the Earth, temperatures have risen 0.6 C per decade during the last thirty years - twice as fast as the global average.
Permafrost has warmed nearly 11 degrees F (-11.7 C) in the past 30 years, according to co-author Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost expert with the UAF Geophysical Institute. In the 1980s, the temperature of permafrost in Alaska, Russia and other Arctic regions averaged to be almost 18 F (-7.8 C). Now the average is just over 28 F (-2.2 C).
Two decades ago, scientists thought that as permafrost thawed, carbon would be released in a big "bomb" and significantly accelerate climate warming.
"The data from our team's syntheses don't support the permafrost carbon bomb view," said McGuire. "What our syntheses do show is that permafrost carbon is likely to be released in a gradual and prolonged manner, and that the rate of release through 2100 is likely to be of the same order as the current rate of tropical deforestation in terms of its effects on the carbon cycle."
Most climate modelers want to incorporate the permafrost carbon feedback into their models, say these scientists, but whether they do or don't is a matter of their priorities given the multitude of issues that such models must consider. McGuire, Romanovsky and their co-authors consider the synthesis very important information for climate models in setting their priorities.
"If society's goal is to try to keep the rise in global temperatures under two degrees C and we haven't taken permafrost carbon release into account in terms of mitigation efforts, then we might underestimate that amount of mitigation effort required to reach that goal," McGuire said.
Scientists in the Permafrost Carbon Network plan to continue to help the modeling community make refinement to improve representation of permafrost carbon and its fate in a warming world. They recommend improved observation networks, including remote sensing capabilities to quantify real-time carbon dioxide and methane emissions from permafrost regions.
by Luther Blissett » Thu Apr 09, 2015 12:20 pm
by zangtang » Thu Apr 09, 2015 1:27 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Apr 09, 2015 5:59 pm
Scientists seek source of giant methane mass over Southwest
DENVER (AP) — Scientists are working to pinpoint the source of a giant mass of methane hanging over the southwestern U.S., which a study found to be the country's largest concentration of the greenhouse gas.
The report that revealed the methane hot spot over the Four Corners region — where Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona meet — was released last year.
Now, scientists from the University of Colorado, the University of Michigan, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA are conducting a monthlong study to figure out exactly where it came from.
The answer could help reduce methane emissions that contribute to global warming. Here are some key things to know:
___
HOT SPOT
Last year's study by NASA and the University of Michigan was based on images from a European satellite captured between 2003 and 2009. They showed the methane hot spot as a red blip over the area, which is about half the size of Connecticut.
The study found the concentration of methane detected there would trap more heat in the atmosphere than all the carbon dioxide produced each year in Sweden.
Methane doesn't last as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, but it's far more potent for capturing heat in the short term.
___
POSSIBLE SOURCES
Methane occurs naturally and also is emitted by landfills and the agricultural and oil and natural gas industries.
One possible source of the hot spot is methane released from the region's coal deposits.
The releases can happen naturally, especially where coal seams reach the earth's surface. They also occur deliberately when energy companies extract methane — the primary component of natural gas — from coal beds.
The region is home to the San Juan Basin, North America's most productive area coal bed methane extraction area.
Methane also is released by coal mining and oil and gas drilling systems, and cattle produce large amounts of the gas. Scientists can pinpoint the kind of methane created by fossil fuels by looking for the presence of associated hydrocarbons.
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HEALTH EFFECTS
The methane emissions pose no direct safety or health risks for Four Corners residents, although the hot spot does factor into overall global warming.
Also, methane emitted from traditional oil and gas operations usually is accompanied by hydrocarbon emissions that can create ozone, a pollutant that leads to smog and is linked to asthma and respiratory illness.
___
INVESTIGATING THE MYSTERY
For the next month, scientists based in Durango will fly in planes with a variety of instruments that can sense methane in the San Juan Basin. Crews in vans will follow up on their leads on the ground.
The European satellite that captured the hot spot is no longer in use, but Japan's GOSAT satellite plans to focus in on the Four Corners when it passes over the area.
It's possible methane levels over the Four Corners have changed since 2009, said Gabrielle Petron, a scientist at the University of Colorado's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences who is working on the latest study. Coal bed methane operations have declined since then, but oil production has increased.
by Squatterman » Thu Apr 09, 2015 6:39 pm
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