Arctic methane: World to end with a fart, not a bang?

by Stevie Smith - Mar 5 2010, 07:16

It seems that with each passing day our fragile atmosphere faces yet another pounding from the merciless advances of global warming. According to concerned scientists, the latest threat stems from large amounts of harmful methane that’s currently escaping from below the Arctic seabed. Awesome news.

The worrying leak, which was discovered by researchers aboard Russian icebreakers surveying the East Siberian Sea, has been linked to rising water temperatures responsible for destabilising the methane and accelerating emissions from within usually protective sub-sea permafrost capping.

Speaking with The Times, Dr. Natalia Shakhova of the University of Alaska said the sub-sea permafrost cap is beginning to fail due to increased levels of thawing and the accumulation of methane at high pressure beneath it.

“The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict,” said Dr. Shakhova. “This type of source has never been predicted by anyone and has not been included in climate models. We’re going to keep studying this region and investigating why this is happening.”

According to the team’s research, which is published today in the journal Science, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf has recently leaked almost seven teragrams of methane into the atmosphere – each the equivalent of around 1.1 billion tonnes of carbon.

While much of the concern directed at climate change is generally focused on the planet’s production of Carbon Dioxide (CO2), methane is considered to be some 25 times more powerful in its effects as a damaging greenhouse gas.

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