Vergent
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S&S just published a new paper on the ESAS.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7/1/015201/pdf/1748-9326_7_1_015201.pdf
On carbon transport and fate in the East Siberian Arctic land–shelf–atmosphere system
It was submitted Aug 5, so it doesn't cover the recent findings.
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That was weird. It was clear the interviewee was holding back a bit to not politicize this threw alarmism. but also admitted the 8gt is undeRdone. and that the methane is 6-8k years old.
She was holding back on the current findings because of the rules about prior publication. If she revealed the major findings in the interview, that would be considered publication. They would loose the ability to publish in a journal like Science.
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The jump started in July and now soars to a new record high that is quite a bit higher than before. Clearly a "new" source or the ESAS just was a stronger source to feed the Northern Hemisphere.
It is also no wonder the arctic has suffered amplified warming with these gases being strongest and most concentrated up there. This is also the hardest place to keep track of SATs which I hope soon they deploy a new satelitte soley for arctic temperature. That can reach the pole or closer at a more accurate depiction than the current satelittes.
Anyways. Is methane only coming out of the Laptev and ESB or also the Chuchki, Kara, and Barents?
The open waters are also making a significant contribution. 2500% supersaturation over the arctic is not trivial.
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Just so people don't carry away the wrong impression, there has been no long term warming trend over the past 10k years. The natural peak temp of the Holocene period occured about 8,000 years ago and slowly declined over the following 6,000 years. The temperature began to rise about 2,000 years ago with the big jump occuring over the past 150 years which has returned temp to near what it was during the Holocene Thermal Maximum 8,000 years ago.
Yes it should take hundreds of years to destablise the deeply buried hydrates, but what about exasperating those already outgasing and those potentially already close to doing so?
when in the last 800,000 years have we been in a similar situation?
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We know that the December anomaly is 14ppb higher than 2010. This means the methane must be up at 1854ppb, off the chart.
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Skeptical Science interview is available.
Thanks!
A couple things stand out. The methane is coming from >50m depth, that means that a greater portion of the methane goes into solution in the water. It also means that the mud cap over the hydrate is thinner. At much greater depth it can be on the surface. This is an a dangerous combination. The methane chimneys must be churning up the sea bottom, the sediment could then be carried away by the current, further destabilizing the hydrate by reducing the pressure on it.
Just in December updates:
The December 70-90 anomaly is over 10ppb higher than any previous December, and is the highest on record.
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Am interesting presentation by Yurganov regarding Arctic CH4 measurements.
I see I'm not the only one haunting Yurganov's archive, waiting for the December update.
Huff past is taking this seriously.
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Meanwhile, the land-based permafrost is estimated to increase to about 1 Gt/yr in this abstract:
Damn paywall. If you add in an equal amount from the arctic ocean you get this;
About 8W GHG forcing by 2030, ignoring albedo feedback, which would be huge in the arctic. How could the permafrost melt not accelerate? How could the ice cap not melt? How could Greenland not melt? It seems that the "worst case scenario" is now the predicted norm. Do we need a new worst case scenario?
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No historical data at all. As the source authors said....the methane burbs where from areas they never observed before.
You don't read the things you post and you don't read things other posters post.
There are thirty pages on that website, dozens of videos, a 16 page booklet, and you read it all in a half hour, I'm impressed.
Unfortunately the new data is not published yet, but for historical relevance, here is last years paper on the same subject.
http://files.instrument.com.cn/FilesCenter/20100607/SH101432-133263.pdf
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Maybe i missed something......Where are Russian Scientists reporting a large increase in the rate of methane release?
http://www.arctic-methane-emergency-group.org/#/letter-to-leaders/4558749249
Rember; Don't panic!!! and don't forget your towel.
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These ideas are insane. We don't know the ramifications of doing either of these things. Big, big mistake.
It would not be like this;
It would be more like this;
The oil industry has been burning off methane from their oil fields since the start. The chemistry is simple CH4+2O2=CO2+2H2O. The resulting CO2 has 5% the environmental impact of the methane. While the methane is not good, the CO2 is 20 times less bad.
The breakwater would have floodgates to allow migration and to regulate the flow of energy. It could be removed as easily as it could be built. It is a project on the scale of Kansai airport, that was built in 30 meter deep water.
If the consequences were worse than the methane, it could of course be removed. But once the methane is in the atmosphere, there is little we can do about it.
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For the record, while I am alarmed by a new source of GHG with the potential to multiply the current climate forcing, I am not panicked by it. There is a simple remediation.
- Ignite any strong local vents.
- Build a breakwater/railroad bridge across the Bering Strait. This would reduce the thermal import to the arctic by 1/3, and change the Arctic ice cap from a yearly net melt to a yearly net freeze. This would pay for itself.
- Ignite any strong local vents.
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r
Real climate makes fun of methane alarmism. No way you can read it otherwise.
Real Climate is way into alarmism.
http://www.realclima...#comment-224271
In response to comment #22
But 200 Gton is a lot of carbon. Shakhova et al are claiming 50 Gton C. They argue that a release of that size could come out instantaneously, and if it did, I agree with them, the climate impacts would be immense.
Using his own calculator
http://forecast.uchi...ts/methane.html
Shakhova's release of 50Gt would shoot GHG forcing up to 8w/m^2. It would drop down to 6w/m^2 in thirty years.
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Real climate.....AGW champions..founded by Galvin Schmit and Mike Mann....Puke on the idea that methane is a threat.
You mean this Gavin Schmidt?
Methane and environmental change during the Paleocene‐Eocene
thermal maximum (PETM): Modeling the PETM onset as a
two‐stage event
David A. Carozza,1,2 Lawrence A. Mysak,1 and Gavin A. Schmidt3
For CH4 to reproduce the characteristics of stage 2, however, it
must be abruptly released. These results are therefore consistent
with a catastrophic release of methane hydrate from
sediment, followed by the oxidation of a part of this CH4 in
the water column and the escape of the remaining CH4 to the
atmosphere.
http://magician.ucsd...s/carozza11.pdf
He was speaking of 1000Gt release over a 500 year period. That would look like this.
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David archer has an online model for atmospheric methane release.
http://forecast.uchi...ts/methane.html
This is the result of releasing 16Gt over a 20 year period.(a 100 fold increase over the current 8Mt rate). This corrisponds to 1% of the known ESAS reserves being vented. With 5 watt forcing the permafrost would be vanishing very fast so lets release 1% of those reserves over the next 20 years 32Gt over 40 years.
This is not good.
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Another plain vanilla article from the NYT. Although this one did allow one oposing view.
http://dotearth.blog...arctic-methane/
Saw it too late to get a high comment, but the first response made the same point I would have made. I would have added that we have not had much luck modeling arctic ice, how can we have such confidence in our methane hydrate models?
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At a lecture from 12/2010 the 3.5 GT figure was used - this was prior to the expedition that found venting orders of magnitude worse than previous observations.
page 34
Nice find. That number was attributed to Archer in a 2005 paper. He must have changed his mind or funding organization, in 2007 he wrote this;
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http://cid-yama.live...com/368223.html
Non-gradual methane releases from ESAS quantified
From a symposium November 30th.
Bad news: directly observed fluxes exceed estimated by up to 3 orders of magnitude
Interpretation of acoustical data recorded with deployed multibeam sonar allowed moderate quantification of bottom fluxes as high as 44 g/m2/d (Leifer et al., in preparation). Prorating these numbers to the areas of hot spots (210×103 km2) adds 3.5Gt to annual methane release from the ESAS. This is enough to trigger abrupt climate change.
That's in addition to the 8 tg from non-abrupt releases. This is the figure we were waiting on. This is the estimated additional releases from abrupt non-linear sources. 3.5 Gt a year.
I would be more careful of posting a bloggers interpretation of an interview. The interview was 3/5/10, so the paper was the 2010 paper that does not support the bloggers numbers.
http://www.sciencema...cast_100305.pdf
I don't see how he got those numbers from the interview.
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What happened to this place? I miss the days when frivolousz and skierinvermont ran the backbone of the AGW side, at least they bring legitimate science to the table. Now the scientific method has gone up in flames, very sad.
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Most of those 3200GT is buried deep in the arctic and would take 1000s of years to be released, if ever.
1600GT is on the continental shelves and under ice shelves. This topic is about that methane.
All you are doing is looking at that 3200GT number and then in wishful ignorance assuming that this will suddenly belch from deep under the surface into the atmosphere. You are wishcasting and making wild assumptions with absolutely zero basis in fact or physics.
"The total amount of carbon preserved within the ESAS as organic matter and ready to release CH4from seabed deposits is predicted to be ∼1400 Gt. Release of only a small fraction of this reservoir, which was sealed with impermeable permafrost for thousands of years, would significantly alter the annual CH4 budget and have global implications, because the shallowness of the ESAS allows the majority of CH4 to pass through the water column and escape to the atmosphere."
http://www.agu.org/p...9JC005602.shtml
N. Shakhova
International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska, USA
Pacific Oceanological Institute, Russian Academy of Science, Vladivostok, Russia
I. Semiletov
International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska, USA
Pacific Oceanological Institute, Russian Academy of Science, Vladivostok, Russia
I. Leifer
University of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, USA
A. Salyuk
Pacific Oceanological Institute, Russian Academy of Science, Vladivostok, Russia
P. Rekant
VNIIOkeangeologia, Saint Petersburg, Russia
D. Kosmach
Pacific Oceanological Institute, Russian Academy of Science, Vladivostok, Russia
The RC author assumes a 100-fold increase in methane emissions and finds that even in this bizarre and highly improbable worst case scenario which contradicts all modeling and observation to date, CH4 is still only comparable to CO2 and the effect is much more short-lived.
We went from; no observations of significant direct venting of methane to the atmosphere prior to 2009, to methane vents "tens of meters in diameter" in 2009(at least a 100 fold increase), to hundreds of fountains of methane some over a thousand meters in diameter in 2011(indicating a 50 fold increase in diameter and a 2500-fold increase in area).
What is so bizarre or improbable about another 100-fold increase? With 1,400GT in the ESAS, it is hardly worst case.
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http://www.realclima...ane/#more-10412
RealClimate has a thread up no on the methane story, with the OP taking vanilla......
Should be worth watching
More vanilla from realclimate. They are pushing hard on this. They are still using numbers from a 2007 article that gets its numbers from even earlier articles.
200 Gt worst case???????
When there are 3,200 Gt of known vulnerable stores? 1,600 in Continental shelf hydrates, and an additional 1,600 in and under terrestrial semi-permafrost.
http://darchive.mblwhoilibrary.org:8080/bitstream/handle/1912/4553/2010GB003845.pdf?sequence=1
This article shows that the indirect forcing is double the direct forcing, and the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere is greatly extended at higher concentrations.
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The video is worthless, there is no scale to tell what the colors represent concentration wise for methane. Also I love your scientific use of the word farts, very professional.
http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Flatulence
"The lesser component gases methane and hydrogen are flammable, and so flatus containing adequate amounts of these can be ignited."
This is not good.
in Climate Change
Posted
Using the 14ppb number for 70-90N I get 0.9Mt C. This was for a four month period, so the yearly number would be 2.7Mt/year. This represents a 34% increase in arctic methane sourcing, over the previously reported 8Mt/year. There is a long way to go before it is a global threat. But it has gone from next to nothing to Mt/year in about three years.
BTW