Underpaid Genius

Clathrates Are Melting

There is a strong subtext in this piece: Don’t panic.

But this should be a cause for panic.

- Cornelia Dean, Study Says Undersea Release of Methane Is Under Way

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 journal Science 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.

Releasing even a small part of the clathrates (as this permafrost trapped methane is known) could lead to catastrophic impacts on climate:

from Wikipedia: Methane clathrates and Climate change

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. Despite its short atmospheric half life of 7 years, methane has a global warming potential of 62 over 20 years and 21 over 100 years (IPCC, 1996; Berner and Berner, 1996; vanLoon and Duffy, 2000). The sudden release of large amounts of natural gas from methane clathrate deposits has been hypothesized as a cause of past and possibly future climate changes. Events possibly linked in this way are the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

Climate scientists such as James E. Hansen expect that methane clathrates in the permafrost regions will be released as a result of global warming, unleashing powerful feedback forces which may cause runaway climate change that cannot be controlled (presuming that climate change could be controlled in any case).

Recent research carried out in 2008 in the Siberian Arctic has shown millions of tons of methane being released^{[27][28][29][30][31]} with concentrations in some regions reaching up to 100 times above normal.^[32][33]