Scientists Discover New Global Warming Threat: ‘Methane Time Bomb’ Under Arctic Seabed
Scientists have today warned that global warming could rapidly accelerate as millions of tons of methane escape from the arctic seabed. According to preliminary findings, as the Arctic region gets warmer massive deposits of the greenhouse gas - 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - are rising to the surface.
Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University, one of the expedition’s leaders, said in an email from their Russian research ship that, for the first time, the team had discovered an extensive area of methane release so intense that “the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface.” The team believe that the accelerated release is connected to rising temperatures throughout the Arctic region.
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Gustafsson went on to report that “the conventional thought has been that the permafrost ‘lid’ on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place.” However, extensive research across thousands of square miles of the Arctic seabed had revealed growing evidence “that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leak methane.”
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Image Credit - Nick_Russill via Flickr on a Creative Commons License
I say this world is dieing slowly the U.S. has changed since the Founding Fathers. We try to find ways to save this planet, but it’s starting to just plainly die. Think about it.
WOW! WE’RE ALL GOING TO BE KILLED BY A GIANT FART!
Great idea Bobby - we can send Sarah Palin’s husband out in a motorboat to buzz around the Arctic sea with a beaker and catch all the methane bubbles as they pop! We’ll be rich!
this is really a bunch of CRAP. We cannot realistically believe that man can harm this planet, even if we set out to do so. It has been through many changes in the BILLLIONS of years it has been here and changes will continue with or without us. It’s all about the money, everything “GREEN” costs us more and nothing has changed due to these efforts. In fact, in the last two years, the earth has COOLED and may continue to do so due to inactivity of sun spots. We can’t blame human activity for that, can we? What a pile of tripe!
Are those chemtrails I see in the background of that ice berg? Are they spraying up there, as they are over the rest of the world? And what might that have to do with global warming? How about everything to do with it?
We should stop burning fossil fuels all together. It ruins the atmosphere and destroys the environment. I look at Earth as a living organism. It is after all ‘Mother Earth’. And much like every living creature it has enough poison within its body, if ingested to destroy itself. Say your appendix were to burst. You would get sick, and possibly die. But your body has places to absorb and dissolve all of these toxins that we intake on a daily basis.
The Earth is no different. Soil and water act as shield and purifiers to keep these toxins stable and undercontrol. When we humans drill for oil and burn that fuel, it then is ingested by the Earth filtered by its air, land, water, and destroys the ozone layer which protects us from space. We are the cancer on this beautiful beacon, and we need to STOP ACTING LIKE IT. Don’t be a cancer. You are only a human being when you are being human. - I said that.
This story is leaky. “Permafrost lid”? The arctic ice breaks and floats every summer, thus leaking the methane trapped. These are not vast reservoirs of trapped methane. They are products soil bacteria on the ocean floor. The large trapped reservoirs of gas trapped are trapped by the enormous pressure exerted by the water above them. As much as we would like to think the entire ocean is warming this observed trend is limited to the surface. Water’s heat capacity makes it an excellent insulator thus past the first 30 meters of surface water very little if any warming occurs,go a couple of hundred meters and your at insane pressures and freezing water temps all are adequate for trapping gasses. This is one of the main principles behind creating CO2 reclamation trenches in the ocean. Once again shoty science by sensational news writers.
Funny - if science came out tomorrow with videos claiming that SUVs would increase sperm count or that consuming your weight in pork and cheese daily was now healthy I doubt you would be arguing or looking for alternative “studies” done by “equally qualified” people. You’d go out and buy yourself two more just like the one in your driveway, then sit down and consume an entire hog with cheddar sauce. Because it’s something that threatens your modern comfort you balk. Well, I suppose there are more selfish things than searching desperately for an excuse to keep doing exactly as you please at the expense of everyone else on the planet- I just haven’t seen any.
“COME ON PEOPLE” This is something that has been going on for years. We have just not had the right resources or money/technology to find these “methane pockets” we need to put more money into research or else we are all ucfaded. We sit here and speculate all these theories without even having enough money or resources to support them. Until we get somebody in office that has any idea how things work (and will support such research financially) we are doomed. VOTE OBAMA IF YOU CARE.
-IF- this is true, then doesn’t it support the idea that GW may not be a result of human interference? Think about it, methane slowly rising accelerating the conditions for more methane to rise. It seems that these effects are already in motion, and worry if you will, but preventative measures should not be our concern. We should be figuring out what we are going to do if this indeed affects our climate.