ARCTIC LAND METHANE
Recent analyses suggest that the permafrost thaw could turn the Arctic into a net source of carbon (methane and carbon dioxide), possibly within a decade or two. Carbon that is 30,000 years old is defrosting and emerging at numerous spots around Fairbanks, Alaska, and carbon as old as 43,000 years emerging from lakes in Siberia, Soviet Union. If these carbon releases continue or increase, the “methane clathrate gun” is released.
"As [Land] Permafrost Thaws, Scientists Study the Risks"
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: December 16, 2011
New York Times
FAIRBANKS, Alaska — A bubble rose through a hole in the surface of a frozen lake. It popped, followed by another, and another, as if a pot were somehow boiling in the icy depths.
Every bursting bubble sent up a puff of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas generated beneath the lake from the decay of plant debris. These plants last saw the light of day 30,000 years ago and have been locked in a deep freeze — until now.
“That’s a hot spot,” declared Katey M. Walter Anthony, a leading scientist in studying the escape of methane. A few minutes later, she leaned perilously over the edge of the ice, plunging a bottle into the water to grab a gas sample.
It was another small clue for scientists struggling to understand one of the biggest looming mysteries about the future of the earth.
Experts have long known that northern lands were a storehouse of frozen carbon, locked up in the form of leaves, roots and other organic matter trapped in icy soil — a mix that, when thawed, can produce methane and carbon dioxide, gases that trap heat and warm the planet. But they have been stunned in recent years to realize just how much organic debris is there.
A recent estimate suggests that the perennially frozen ground known as permafrost, which underlies nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, contains twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere.
Temperatures are warming across much of that region, primarily, scientists believe, because of the rapid human release of greenhouse gases. Permafrost is warming, too. Some has already thawed, and other signs are emerging that the frozen carbon may be becoming unstable.
“It’s like broccoli in your freezer,” said Kevin Schaefer, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. “As long as the broccoli stays in the freezer, it’s going to be O.K. But once you take it out of the freezer and put it in the fridge, it will thaw out and eventually decay.”
If a substantial amount of the carbon [methane and carbon dioxide] should enter the atmosphere, it would intensify the planetary warming. An especially worrisome possibility is that a significant proportion will emerge not as carbon dioxide, the gas that usually forms when organic material breaks down, but as methane, produced when the breakdown occurs in lakes or wetlands. Methane is especially potent at trapping the sun’s heat, and the potential for large new methane emissions in the Arctic is one of the biggest wild cards in climate science.
Scientists have declared that understanding the problem is a major priority. The United States Department of Energy and the European Union recently committed to new projects aimed at doing so, and NASA is considering a similar plan. But researchers say the money and people devoted to the issue are still minimal compared with the risk.
For now, scientists have many more questions than answers. Preliminary computer analyses, made only recently, suggest that the Arctic regions could eventually become an annual source of carbon equal to 15 percent or so of today’s yearly emissions from human activities.
But those calculations were deliberately cautious. A recent survey drew on the expertise of 41 permafrost scientists to offer more informal projections. They estimated that if human fossil-fuel burning remained high and the planet warmed sharply, the gases from permafrost could eventually equal 35 percent of today’s annual human emissions.
The experts also said that if humanity began getting its own emissions under control soon, the greenhouse gases emerging from permafrost could be kept to a much lower level, perhaps equivalent to 10 percent of today’s human emissions.
Even at the low end, these numbers mean that the long-running international negotiations over greenhouse gases are likely to become more difficult, with less room for countries to continue burning large amounts of fossil fuels.
In the minds of most experts, the chief worry is not that the carbon in the permafrost will break down quickly — typical estimates say that will take more than a century, perhaps several — but that once the decomposition starts, it will be impossible to stop.
“Even if it’s 5 or 10 percent of today’s emissions, it’s exceptionally worrying, and 30 percent is humongous,” said Josep G. Canadell, a scientist in Australia who runs a global program to monitor greenhouse gases. “It will be a chronic source of emissions that will last hundreds of years.”
A troubling trend has emerged recently: Wildfires are increasing across much of the north, and early research suggests that extensive burning could lead to a more rapid thaw of permafrost.
Rise and Fall of Permafrost
Standing on a bluff the other day, overlooking an immense river valley, A. David McGuire, a scientist from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, sketched out two million years of the region’s history. It was the peculiar geology of western North America and eastern Siberia, he said, that caused so much plant debris to get locked in an ice box there.
These areas were not covered in glaciers during the last ice age, but the climate was frigid, with powerful winds. The winds and rivers carried immense volumes of silt and dust that settled in the lowlands of Alaska and Siberia.
A thin layer of this soil thawed on top during the summers and grasses grew, capturing carbon dioxide. In the bitter winters, grass roots, leaves and even animal parts froze before they could decompose. Layer after layer of permafrost built up.
At the peak of the ice age, 20,000 years ago, the frozen ground was more extensive than today, stretching deep into parts of the lower 48 states that were not covered by ice sheets. Climate-change contrary theory points to that history, contending that any melting of permafrost and ice sheets today is simply the tail end of the ice age.
Citing permafrost temperatures for northern Alaska — which, though rising rapidly, remain well below freezing — an organization called the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change claimed that permafrost is in “no more danger of being wiped out any time soon than it was in the days of our great-grandparents.”
But mainstream scientists, while hoping the breakdown of permafrost will indeed be slow, reject that argument. They say the climate was reasonably stable for the past 10,000 years or so, during the period when human civilization arose. Now, as people burn immense amounts of carbon in the form of fossil fuels, the planet’s temperature is rising, and the Arctic is warming twice as fast. That, scientists say, puts the remaining permafrost deposits at risk.
For several decades, researchers have been monitoring permafrost temperatures in hundreds of boreholes across the north. The temperatures have occasionally decreased in some regions for periods as long as a decade, but the overall trend has been a relentless rise, with temperatures now increasing fastest in the most northerly areas.
Thawing has been most notable at the southern margins. Across huge areas, including much of central Alaska, permafrost is hovering just below the freezing point, and is expected to start thawing in earnest as soon as the 2020s. In northern Alaska and northern Siberia, where permafrost is at least 12 degrees Fahrenheit below freezing, experts say it should take longer.
“Even in a greenhouse-warmed world, it will still get cold and dark in the Arctic in the winter,” said Mark Serreze, director of the snow and ice data center in Boulder.
Scientists need better inventories of the ancient carbon. The best estimate so far was published in 2009 by a Canadian scientist, Charles Tarnocai, and some colleagues. They calculated that there was about 1.7 trillion tons of carbon in soils of the northern regions, about 88 percent of it locked in permafrost. That is about two and a half times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
Philippe Ciais, a leading French scientist, wrote at the time that he was “stunned” by the estimate, a large upward revision from previous calculations.
“If, in a warmer world, bacteria decompose organic soil matter faster, releasing carbon dioxide,” Dr. Ciais wrote, “this will set up a positive feedback loop, speeding up global warming.”
Plumes of Methane
Katey Walter Anthony had been told to hunt for methane, and she could not find it.
As a young researcher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, she wanted to figure out how much of that gas was escaping from lakes in areas of permafrost thaw. She was doing field work in Siberia in 2000, scattering bubble traps around various lakes in the summer, but she got almost nothing.
Then, that October, the lakes froze over. Plumes of methane that had been hard to spot on a choppy lake surface in summer suddenly became more visible.
“I went out on the ice, this black ice, and it looked like the starry night sky,” Dr. Walter Anthony said. “You could see these bubble clusters everywhere. I realized — ‘aha!’ — this is where all the methane is.”
When organic material comes out of the deep freeze, it is consumed by bacteria. If the material is well-aerated, bacteria that breathe oxygen will perform the breakdown, and the carbon will enter the air as carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas. But in areas where oxygen is limited, like the bottom of a lake or wetland, a group of bacteria called methanogens will break down the organic material, and the carbon will emerge as methane.
Scientists are worried about both gases. They believe that most of the carbon will emerge as carbon dioxide, with only a few percent of it being converted to methane. But because methane is such a potent greenhouse gas, the 41 experts in the recent survey predicted that it would trap about as much heat as the carbon dioxide would.
Dr. Walter Anthony’s seminal discovery was that methane rose from lake bottoms not as diffuse leaks, as many scientists had long assumed, but in a handful of scattered, vigorous plumes, some of them capable of putting out many quarts of gas per day. In certain lakes they accounted for most of the emerging methane, but previous research had not taken them into consideration. That meant big upward revisions were probably needed in estimates of the amount of methane lakes might emit as permafrost thawed.
Most of the lakes Dr. Walter Anthony studies were formed by a peculiar mechanism. Permafrost that is frozen hard supports the ground surface, almost the way a concrete pillar supports a building. But when thaw begins, the ground sometimes turns to mush and the entire land surface collapses into a low-lying area, known as a thermokarst. A lake or wetland can form there, with the dark surface of the water capturing the sun’s heat and causing still more permafrost to thaw nearby.
Near thermokarst locations, trees often lean crazily because their roots are disturbed by the rapid changes in the underlying landscape, creating “drunken forests.” And the thawing, as it feeds on itself, frees up more and more ancient plant debris.
One recent day, in 11-degree weather, Dr. Walter Anthony and an assistant, Amy Strohm, dragged equipment onto two frozen thermokarst lakes near Fairbanks. The fall had been unusually warm and the ice was thin, emitting thunderous cracks — but it held. In spots, methane bubbled so vigorously it had prevented the water from freezing. Dr. Walter Anthony, six months pregnant, bent over one plume to retrieve samples.
“This is thinner ice than we like,” she said. “Don’t tell my mother-in-law! My own mother doesn’t know.”
Dr. Walter Anthony had already run chemical tests on the methane from one of the lakes, dating the carbon molecules within the gas to 30,000 years ago. She has found carbon that old emerging at numerous spots around Fairbanks, and carbon as old as 43,000 years emerging from lakes in Siberia.
“These grasses were food for mammoths during the end of the last ice age,” Dr. Walter Anthony said. “It was in the freezer for 30,000 to 40,000 years, and now the freezer door is open.”
Scientists are not sure yet whether thermokarst lakes will become more common throughout the Arctic in a warming climate, a development that could greatly accelerate permafrost thaw and methane production. But they have already started to see increases in some regions, including northernmost Alaska.
“We expect increased thermokarst activity could be a very strong effect, but we don’t really know,” said Guido Grosse, another scientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He is working with Dr. Walter Anthony on precision mapping of thermokarst lakes and methane seeps, in the hope that the team can ultimately use satellites and aerial photography to detect trends.
With this kind of work still in the early stages, researchers are worried that the changes in the region may already be outrunning their ability to understand them, or to predict what will happen.
When the Tundra Burns
One day in 2007, on the plain in northern Alaska, a lightning strike set the tundra on fire.
Historically, tundra, a landscape of lichens, mosses and delicate plants, was too damp to burn. But the climate in the area is warming and drying, and fires in both the tundra and forest regions of Alaska are increasing.
The Anaktuvuk River fire burned about 400 square miles of tundra, and work on lake sediments showed that no fire of that scale had occurred in the region in at least 5,000 years.
Scientists have calculated that the fire and its aftermath sent a huge pulse of carbon into the air — as much as would be emitted in two years by a city the size of Miami. Scientists say the fire thawed the upper layer of permafrost and set off what they fear will be permanent shifts in the landscape.
Up to now, the Arctic has been absorbing carbon, on balance, and was once expected to keep doing so throughout this century. But recent analyses suggest that the permafrost thaw could turn the Arctic into a net source of carbon, possibly within a decade or two, and those studies did not account for fire.
“I maintain that the fastest way you’re going to lose permafrost and release permafrost carbon to the atmosphere is increasing fire frequency,” said Michelle C. Mack, a University of Florida scientist who is studying the Anaktuvuk fire. “It’s a rapid and catastrophic way you could completely change everything.”
The essential question scientists need to answer is whether the many factors they do not yet understand could speed the release of carbon from permafrost — or, possibly, slow it more than they expect.
For instance, nutrients released from thawing permafrost could spur denser plant growth in the Arctic, and the plants would take up some carbon dioxide. Conversely, should fires like the one at Anaktuvuk River race across warming northern landscapes, immense amounts of organic material in vegetation, soils, peat deposits and thawed permafrost could burn.
Edward A. G. Schuur, a University of Florida researcher who has done extensive fieldwork in Alaska, is worried by the changes he already sees, including the discovery that carbon buried since before the dawn of civilization is now escaping.
“To me, it’s a spine-tingling feeling, if it’s really old carbon that hasn’t been in the air for a long time, and now it’s entering the air,” Dr. Schuur said. “That’s the fingerprint of a major disruption, and we aren’t going to be able to turn it off someday.”
Fin
Within the scientific community, there remains a long felt concern that unless natural and human global warming greenhouse gas emissions do not soon decline (by 2020), a window of opportunity closes to stop global warming temperature increase. Having missed the window, an Earth’s new temperature regulation establishes a stabilizing point that is an unlivable temperature increase of 6 degrees Centigrade, prior to 2099.
METHANE: A Changing GWP - The effects of a critical greenhouse gas on global warming have been significantly underestimated, according to MOST RECENT research suggesting that emissions controls and climate models may need to be revised.
Earth's heat exchange rate between carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is generally calculated according to global warming potential (GWP), which measures the effects of one tonne of a gas on warming over 20, 100, and 500 years in comparison to one tonne of carbon dioxide. UNFCCC identifies Global Warming Potentials (GWP) for methane includes indirect effects of tropospheric ozone production and stratospheric water vapor production for 20 years is 53. However, UNFCCC GWP has not included interaction with carbon monoxide, oxidants, sulphates aerosols molecules and other chemical actions. Dependent upon chemical composition of the atmosphere, GWP of methane is 53 to 75 and can be as high as 120.
The recalculated 20 year GWP of methane is 75 times that of carbon dioxide, which is a very significant global warming factor increase.
Methane has become a very-interesting positive feedback global warming temperature-increase greenhouse gas. Its impact on global temperatures is about a third higher than generally thought because previous estimates have not accounted for its interaction with airborne particles called aerosols. “What happens is that as you put more methane into the atmosphere, it competes for oxidants such as hydroxyl with sulphur dioxide. More methane means less sulphate, which is reflective and thus has a cooling effect. Calculations of GWP including these gas-aerosol linkages thus substantially increase the value for methane.” --Dr Shindell
Methane (CH4) may account for up to a third of the global warming from greenhouse gases between 1750 AD and 2050 AD. Reference: "Methane’s impact on global warming far higher than previously thought," The Times, October 30, 2009
A Brief Methane GWP Change Summary: There appears to be an atmospheric chemical reaction between methane (CH4) and industrial/transportation emissions. More methane means fewer sulphates. Sulfate is reflective and thus has a cooling effect. Therefore, more methane interaction with sulfate means fewer sulfates and less global cooling effect (i.e., more global warming).
When the indirect air borne particles (aerosols) effect upon potent greenhouse gas methane is included in GWP calculations, one tonne of methane has about one-third more effect on the global warming over 20 years than has previously been understood.
Political global warming policy decisions (if there ever are any) must include accounting for interactions and links to emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, sulfates, and atmospheric aerosols.
It is becoming more evident that measured methane atmospheric content (parts per billion volume - ppbv) is increasing its proportion of global warming gas share while methane is also increasing its global warming potential (GWP) to warm Earth. Therefore, global warming is getting warmer.
Global-warming potential (GWP) is a relative measure of how much heat a greenhouse gas traps in the atmosphere. GWP compares the amount of heat trapped by a certain mass (one tonne) of the gas in question to the amount of heat trapped by a similar mass of carbon dioxide. A GWP calculated over a specific time interval, commonly 20, 100, or 500 years. GWP is expressed as a factor of carbon dioxide (whose GWP is standardized to 1).
For example, the 20-year GWP of methane has been 56, which means if the same weights of methane and carbon dioxide introduced into the atmosphere, methane will trap 56 times more heat than the carbon dioxide over the next 20 years. However, it now appears that because of chemical interactions with decreased industrial/transportation emissions has resulted in a methane GWP increase. In the new example, the industrial/transportation emissions real GWP of methane is 75 times that of carbon dioxide. A change in GWP from 56 to 75 has a profound effect upon projected global warming temperature increase.
Methane’s 20 year GWP physical property contributes significantly to the increased rate of global warming temperature increase. This increase in methane GWP is ironic because a decrease in industrial transportation emissions results in an increase in global warming temperature increase.
“Methane Releases From Arctic Shelf May Be Much Larger and Faster Than Anticipated”
Thawing by climate change of subsea layer of permafrost may release stores of underlying, seabed methane
National Science Foundation
-NSF- Press Release 10-036
March 4, 2010
Illustration - The permafrost of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (an area of about 2 million kilometers squared or 0.772 million miles squared or 2.87 times the size of Texas) is more porous than previously thought. The ocean on top of it and the heat from the mantle below it warm it and make it perforated like Swiss cheese. This allows methane gas stored under it under pressure to burst into the atmosphere. The amount leaking from this locale is comparable to all the methane from the rest of the world's oceans put together. Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. NSF LINK
A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov.
The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is starting to leak large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.
"The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world's oceans," said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF International Arctic Research Center. "Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap."
Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material (which contains carbon) stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under anaerobic conditions, gradually releases methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of Arctic Ocean. It is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova's research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source, releasing 7 teragrams of methane yearly, which is as much as is emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons.
"Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already," she said. "If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger."
Shakhova notes that the Earth's geological record indicates that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about 0.3 to 0.4 parts per million during cold periods to 0.6 to 0.7 parts per million during warm periods. Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, she said. Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a relative frontier in methane studies. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters (164 feet) or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth's history. During the Earth's coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the Earth warms and sea level rises, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 oC degrees warmer than the average Arctic air temperature.
"It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen," Shakhova said. "Nobody considered this huge area."
"This study is a testament to sustained, careful observations and to international cooperation in research," said Henrietta Edmonds of the National Science Foundation, which partially funded the study. "The Arctic is a difficult place to get to and to work in, but it is important that we do so in order to understand its role in global climate and its response and contribution to ongoing environmental change. It is important to understand the size of the reservoir--the amount of trapped methane that potentially could be released--as well as the processes that have kept it "trapped" and those that control the release. Work like this helps us to understand and document these processes."
Earlier studies in Siberia focused on methane escaping from thawing terrestrial permafrost. Semiletov work during the 1990s showed, among other things, that the amount of methane being emitted from terrestrial sources decreased at higher latitudes. But those studies stopped at the coast. Starting in the fall of 2003, Shakhova, Semiletov and the rest of their team took the studies offshore. From 2003 through 2008, they took annual research cruises throughout the shelf and sampled seawater at various depths and the air 10 meters above the ocean. In September 2006, they flew a helicopter over the same area, taking air samples at up to 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) in the atmosphere. In April 2007, they conducted a winter expedition on the sea ice.
They found that more than 80 percent of the deep water and more than 50 percent of surface water had methane levels more than eight times that of normal seawater. In some areas, the saturation levels reached more than 250 times that of background levels in the summer and 1,400 times higher in the winter. They found corresponding results in the air directly above the ocean surface. Methane levels were elevated overall and the seascape was dotted with more than 100 hot spots. This, combined with winter expedition results that found methane gas trapped under and in the sea ice, showed the team that the methane was not only being dissolved in the water, it was bubbling out into the atmosphere.
These findings were further confirmed when Shakhova and her colleagues sampled methane levels at higher elevations. Methane levels throughout the Arctic are usually 8 to 10 percent higher than the global baseline. When they flew over the shelf, they found methane at levels another 5 to 10 percent higher than the already elevated Arctic levels.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, in addition to holding large stores of frozen methane, is more of a concern because it is so shallow. In deep water, methane gas oxidizes into carbon dioxide before it reaches the surface. In the shallows of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, methane simply doesn't have enough time to oxidize, which means more of it escapes into the atmosphere. That, combined with the sheer amount of methane in the region, adds a previously not considered variable to climate models.
"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 said. "The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict."
Shakhova, Semiletov and collaborators from 12 institutions in five countries plan to continue their studies in the region, tracking the source of the methane emissions and drilling in an effort to estimate how much methane is stored there.
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Shakhova and Semiletov hold joint appointments with the Pacific Oceanological Institute, part of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Their collaborators on this paper include Anatoly Salyuk, and Denis Kosmach, all of the Pacific Oceanological Institute, and Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University.
-NSF-
A complete accounting of the global amount of methane clathrate is not available. However, the worldwide amounts of methane bound in ocean gas hydrates and land permafrost is conservatively estimated to total twice the amount of coal, oil, natural gas carbon to be found in all known fossil fuels on Earth. Reducing the release of methane clathrate global warming temperature increase gas is hugely significant to continuing the existence of the human races.
The sudden release of large amounts of natural gas from methane clathrate deposits (likely resulting from the “clathrate gun methane release”) is a cause of past and future geologic global warming climate changes. Events possibly linked in this way is the End-Permian Mass Extinction 252.28 Ma. Resulting from human activity, current global warming rate of change is ten times faster than that of the End-Permian.
Global warming scientific information has been presented over the past three decades and is known within the legitimate scientific community. Since the left Democrat Communists came into power 2007 to present there has been pressure to buy “climate change” silence from the scientific and educational community. The U.S. and European Communists are attempting to create advances in communist world domination of the economies. Political activity to control major sectors of U.S. and European energy is creating the anti-nuclear pretext while promoting “green power.” Elected Communists are to be removed from office because they are actively deceiving the public and are promoting the destruction of the human races to meet short-term communist political objectives.
Global warming science is intentionally distorted and twisted by special interest political groups who have learned their internet skills from left Democrat election campaigns and Obama’s political spin-control forces. There now is little doubt that the greatest threat to survival of human races is World Leadership politics, left Democrat politicians, self serving special interest groups, and a non responsive news media. With this cabal of anti global warming activity dominating world global warming temperature increase, it is clear when all human life ends. 
