Russian Scientists Find Arctic Seas "Oversaturated With Solute Methane" - Ocean Floor Near Melting

Well, boys and girls, this may be it.

EDIT

Russian polar scientists have strong evidence that the first stages of melting are underway. They've studied largest shelf sea in the world, off the coast of Siberia, where the Asian continental shelf stretches across an underwater area six times the size of Germany, before falling off gently into the Arctic Ocean. The scientists are presenting their data from this remote, thinly-investigated region at the annual conference of the European Geosciences Union this week in Vienna.

In the permafrost bottom of the 200-meter-deep sea, enormous stores of gas hydrates lie dormant in mighty frozen layers of sediment. The carbon content of the ice-and-methane mixture here is estimated at 540 billion tons. "This submarine hydrate was considered stable until now," says the Russian biogeochemist Natalia Shakhova, currently a guest scientist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who is also a member of the Pacific Institute of Geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Vladivostok. The permafrost has grown porous, says Shakhova, and already the shelf sea has become "a source of methane passing into the atmosphere." The Russian scientists have estimated what might happen when this Siberian permafrost-seal thaws completely and all the stored gas escapes. They believe the methane content of the planet's atmosphere would increase twelvefold. "The result would be catastrophic global warming," say the scientists. The greenhouse-gas potential of methane is 20 times that of carbon dioxide, as measured by the effects of a single molecule.

Shakhova and her colleagues gathered evidence for the loss of rigor in the frozen sea floor in a measuring campaign during the Siberian summer. The seawater proved to be "highly oversaturated with solute methane," reports Shakhova. In the air over the sea, greenhouse-gas content was measured in some places at five times normal values. "In helicopter flights over the delta of the Lena River, higher methane concentrations have been measured at altitudes as high as 1,800 meters," she says.

EDIT

Data from offshore drilling in the region, studied by experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), also suggest that the situation has grown critical. AWI's results show that permafrost in the flat shelf is perilously close to thawing. Three to 12 kilometers from the coast, the temperature of sea sediment was -1 to -1.5 degrees Celsius, just below freezing. Permafrost on land, though, was as cold as -12.4 degrees Celsius. "That's a drastic difference and the best proof of a critical thermal status of the submarine permafrost," said Shakhova.

EDIT

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,547976,00.html

On edit - fixed link.

This may be a silver lining situation.

Stick a pipeline in one end, and hey, now you're cooking with gas!!!

We can harvest the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to make our giant zippy bag!

Two problems solved!

Either you die fast (massive methane release), or you die slow (more conventional CO2-driven warming). Take your pick, but either way coastal cities will be going underwater.

And nobody likes it when their Dokument nicht gefunden ist!!!

"Well, boys and girls, this may be it."

You may be on to something


Methane prime suspect for greatest mass extinction

16:01 26 March 2002
NewScientist.com news service
Jeff Hecht

The release of massive clouds of methane from icy hydrates buried under shallow ocean floors is the leading suspect for the most devastating extinction in the fossil record, according to a new analysis.

Methane best matches the unusual carbon-isotope fingerprints found at the scene of the crime, says Robert Berner of Yale University in Connecticut, US, though it cannot explain atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at the time.

Berner says: "It's possible that you could have a combination" of effects causing the mass extinction that ended the Permian period, 250 million years ago. The event wiped out the vast majority of marine species and left Europe a near-desert.

Many theories have been proposed to explain the extinction, including a comet or asteroid impact. Other ideas focus on two unusual events at the end of the Permian - the eruptions of two million cubic kilometres of lava across Siberia and unusual stratification of the oceans.

Some have even suggested that the mass dying itself - shown by a sudden abundance of fungi spores at the boundary - could have itself had affected global carbon cycles. Yet solid support for any one theory has been lacking.

snip >

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2088-methane-prime-suspect-for-greatest-mass-extinction.html

Fascinating book. An allegory for our days. Although technically fiction, it explores this phenomenon in depth.

http://www.amazon.com/Swarm-Novel-Frank-Schatzing/dp/B000O17D00/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208561692&sr=8-1

Earth always wins.

Time for some more Ram Dass.

See you on the other side of the bottleneck.

I've been trying to fit the words "Canfield Ocean" into rewritten lyrics for "Sea Of Love" and it's only made me even more frustrated.

Shit, may as well have a :beer:

:rofl:

And I just want to help. Here goes...

Come with me
My love
To the Canfield Ocean
The Canfield Ocean of love

I want to tell you
how much
I love you

Do you remember
When we met
That's the day
I knew you were my benthian anoxic pet

I wanna tell you
how much
I love you

Come with me
My love
To the Canfield Ocean
The Canfield Ocean of love

I wanna tell you
How much
I love you in an anoxic, hydrogen sulfide way

:spray:

Perfect.

You very neatly stated a lot of what I've experienced lo these many years.

:toast:

"It's a long and winding road,
Leading us to who knows where..."

Wait a second, isn't that the Olduvai Gorge just ahead?

This is not a time in history when thinking people can be equanimous (is that even a word?)

Sorry, guy. Not your fault we were born when we were.

Does it accomplish anything useful?

The die is cast. It's time to turn our attention to our own lives, out own responses. I'm not saying we should ignore the elephant in the room. To torture the metaphor a bit, I've decided it will be more useful to spend our energy cleaning up the elephant shit than trying to carry the beast back outside.

You are correct, it doesn't accomplish anything useful.

I have been thinking about the Dioscount Rate and the way the Global Climate Change Denial Industry uses the comprehensive "doomer" smear, so to speak, to dismiss the mountains of scientific evidence.

When we speak of the Discount Rate, we speculate it is an evolutionary adaption, a holdover from times where listening to the "philosophers" of the time leads to pondering while the sabre-toothed tiger is sneaking up on a person to make them a snack, mteaphorically-speaking and perhaps literally, as well.

Now, much as we might dislike the representatives of the multi-billion dollar Global Climate Change Denial Industry, we cannot deny their success or their "genius" in the areas of advertising, PR, and marketing (The Science of Deception).

One wonders if, either instinctively or perhaps actually, they grasp the fact that the "doomer" smear which succeeds in discrediting everything a person ever says with the shortest possible declarative statement "Shut up, you doomer!", is in fact so successful BECAUSE it plays to this hardwired evolutionary adapting which telles the reptile brain, "Don't listen to that doomer. It's too far in the future to care and if you keep uyp with this you are going to be eaten by a tigerw hile you are wasting your time filled with angst."

On a public level, what you say is absolutely true, and ultimately plays into the hands of the Denier Industry, at least from this perspective.

But I think I was speaking personally, here. The old saw, "If you're not outraged (or scared or gloomy or insert emotion here) then you aren't paying attention."

So I do actually agree with you in a public sense. "Doomerism", for whatever reason, is the surest way to turn people off without their conscious minds ever even evaluating the evidence you present.

Something like this:

(shrugs chuckling) You doomers! (turns away without regarding evidence)

But I suppose my flip remark was meant to speak to an internal state of mind, not a strategy for communicating with others. From that perspective, you speak truth and I agree.

this is not news to oceanographers or biogeochemists...

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v368/n6473/abs/368732a0.html

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=13838946

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2836763

When they say "oversaturated", is that the same as "supersaturated"? As in "don't shake, or it all goes *FOOM*"? If so, a sudden, massive outgassing could be triggered by any kind of disturbance -- undersea earthquakes or landslides, for example.

:eyes:

That old Jesse Colin Young tune has been playing in my head lately. "take away, take away the pain of knowing.." My circuits are on overload. Closing down...

being on overload - I'm right there with you. :hug:

This reminds me of the movie (didn't read the book) "And the Band Played On". Still politicians blather; still people sleep.

DONG. :P

I think I'll just get under the bed and chew on a towel.
:-(

Oh fucking hell, we're all doomed.

:scared: :scared: :scared:

For the non-paleo-nerds out there, 50% of all fossils found after the Permian mass extinction (also caused by a methane "burp") are of Lystrosaurs.