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Permafrost Methane A DISASTER WAITING TO HAPPEN
A vast expanse of permafrost in Siberia and Alaska has started to thaw for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago, marked in dark blue on the map. It is caused by the recent 3+°C rise in local temperature over the past 40 years - more than four times the global average. Peat bogs cover an area of a million square miles (or almost a quarter of the earth's land surface) to a depth of 25 meters. Those in Siberia are the world's largest.
What was until recently a barren expanse of frozen peat is turning into a broken landscape of mud and lakes, some more than a kilometre across. All only in the past 3 or 4 years.
Tipping PointsThis has the potential to release vast quantities of methane trapped by ice below the surface - billions of tonnes of methane. World-wide, peat bogs store at least two trillion tons of CO2. This is equivalent to a century of emissions from fossil fuels.
This is one of the most feared tipping points. There is a delicate threshold where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment by triggering a huge and instantaneous increase in global temperature. See Footprints #3.
This melting is an irreversible ecological landslide - a vicious circular feedback that is becoming stronger and stronger, and is doing so more quickly with every passing summer.
Once started extreme global warming would be irreversible.
A significant part of the heat gained during the summer is held within the peat by the autumn snow that acts like a blanket to keep it warm, and thus the heat gained is incremental. This is why the present passion for carbon trading will make no difference to the outcome.
When we start heating these natural systems, the process quickly becomes unstoppable. We do not have any technological brakes we can apply. This is enormously important because we can't put the permafrost back once it's gone. The gasses stored there have the potential to raise temperatures even more than all of our past emissions.
Permafrost Time Bomb
Since the bogs were formed they have been generating methane, most of which has been trapped within the permafrost itself, in ice-like clathrates.
It is estimated that the west Siberian bog alone contains some 70 billion tonnes of methane, a quarter of all the methane stored on the land surface of the world. This is equivalent to emitting 1.7 trillion tons of CO2, which is more greenhouse gas than has been emitted by humans in the past 200 years.
There are already impacts on roads and buildings which are collapsing as the ice-held foundations melt. In addition, once the bog dries out deep sub-surface fires ignited by lightning will themselves create more CO2 to add into the air.
Alarmingly, it has just been reported by Wetlands International that huge areas of wet peatland forests are being drained and logged in Indonesia and Malaysia. Along with the ensuing peat fires this contributes 2 billion tons of CO2, making South-East Asia the third largest polluter in the world behind the US and China.
We CAN reduce our CO2 emissions from fossil fuels but we COULD NOT reduce methane emissions once they get started. These huge natural forces would take over and change our world in double-quick time.
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1.
TerraNature | Melting permafrost methane emissions: Another threat ...
When Siberian permafrost melts, carbon buried since the Pleistocene era is bubbling to the surface of lakes, and dissipating into the atmosphere as methane, ...
www.terranature.org/methaneSiberia.htm - Cached - Similar -
2.
Warming hits 'tipping point' | Environment | The Guardian
- 5:17am
Aug 11, 2005 ... "This is a big deal because you can't put the permafrost back once it's gone. ... Siberia's peat bogs have been producing methane since they ...
www.guardian.co.uk/environment/.../science.climatechange1 - Cached - Similar -
3.
Planet Extinction - Permafrost Melting
- 5:18am
Permafrost Methane Time Bomb. A vast expanse of permafrost in Siberia and Alaska has started to thaw for the first time since it formed 11000 years ago, ...
www.planetextinction.com/planet_extinction_permafrost.htm - Cached - Similar -
4.
News results for METHANE FROM SIBERIA PERMAFROST
Reuters Destabilized subsea permafrost allowing methane to escape - 3 hours ago
Given the huge store of methane in the permafrost, scientists say it is important to get a better read on how much is escaping in not only Siberia, ...
Vancouver Sun - 216 related articles »
5.
Methane bubbling from Siberian thaw lakes as a positive feedback ...
by KM Walter - 2006 - Cited by 129 - Related articles
Thaw lakes in North Siberia are known to emit methane, but the magnitude of ... We find that thawing permafrost along lake margins accounts for most of the ...
www.nature.com › Journal home › Archive › Letter - Similar -
6.
Exclusive: The methane time bomb - Climate Change, Environment ...
Preliminary findings suggest that massive deposits of subsea methane are ... that the permafrost 'lid' on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should ...
www.independent.co.uk › Environment › Climate Change - Cached - Similar -
7.
Methane Bubbling Up From Undersea Permafrost?
Dec 19, 2008 ... The East Siberian Sea is bubbling with methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, being released from underwater reserves, according to a recent ...
news.nationalgeographic.com/.../081219-methane-siberia.html - Cached - Similar -
8.
Relationship between Methane Content in Siberian Permafrost and ...
by A Brouchkov - 2004
Methane is one of the greenhouse gases among other gases, and it is important to identify sources of methane. Permafrost deposits in Siberia contain large ...
adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004AGUSM.C43A..12B - Similar -
9.
Greenhouse Gas Bubbling from Siberian Permafrost § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
Greenhouse Gas Bubbling from Siberian Permafrost. September 13, 2006. Print. methane_bubbles2.jpg Methane bubbles trapped in lake ice in early autumn ...
seedmagazine.com/.../greenhouse_gas_bubbling_from_siberian_permafrost/ - Cached - Similar -
10.
Science stunner: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores ...
Mar 4, 2010 ... However, burning from clathrates and permafrost methane (big implications for Siberian forest fires) could release soot, causing localized ...
climateprogress.org/.../science-nsf-tundra-permafrost-methane-east-siberian-arctic-shelf-venting/ - 10 hours ago -
11.
Massive Methane Melt off Siberia | Mother Jones
Mar 4, 2010 ... Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap." The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area encompassing more ...
motherjones.com/blue-marble/.../massive-methane-melt-siberia - 10 hours ago -
Warming hits 'tipping point'
Siberia feels the heat It's a frozen peat bog the size of France and Germany combined, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas and, for the first time since the ice age, it is melting
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* Ian Sample, science correspondent
* The Guardian, Thursday 11 August 2005 12.36 BST
* Article history
A vast expanse of western Sibera is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists warn today.
Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.
It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying "tipping points" - delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures.
The discovery was made by Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University in western Siberia and Judith Marquand at Oxford University and is reported in New Scientist today.
The researchers found that what was until recently a barren expanse of frozen peat is turning into a broken landscape of mud and lakes, some more than a kilometre across.
Dr Kirpotin told the magazine the situation was an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He added that the thaw had probably begun in the past three or four years.
Climate scientists yesterday reacted with alarm to the finding, and warned that predictions of future global temperatures would have to be revised upwards.
"When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it's unstoppable. There are no brakes you can apply," said David Viner, a senior scientist at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
"This is a big deal because you can't put the permafrost back once it's gone. The causal effect is human activity and it will ramp up temperatures even more than our emissions are doing."
In its last major report in 2001, the intergovernmental panel on climate change predicted a rise in global temperatures of 1.4C-5.8C between 1990 and 2100, but the estimate only takes account of global warming driven by known greenhouse gas emissions.
"These positive feedbacks with landmasses weren't known about then. They had no idea how much they would add to global warming," said Dr Viner.
Western Siberia is heating up faster than anywhere else in the world, having experienced a rise of some 3C in the past 40 years. Scientists are particularly concerned about the permafrost, because as it thaws, it reveals bare ground which warms up more quickly than ice and snow, and so accelerates the rate at which the permafrost thaws.
Siberia's peat bogs have been producing methane since they formed at the end of the last ice age, but most of the gas had been trapped in the permafrost. According to Larry Smith, a hydrologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, the west Siberian peat bog could hold some 70bn tonnes of methane, a quarter of all of the methane stored in the ground around the world.
The permafrost is likely to take many decades at least to thaw, so the methane locked within it will not be released into the atmosphere in one burst, said Stephen Sitch, a climate scientist at the Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter.
But calculations by Dr Sitch and his colleagues show that even if methane seeped from the permafrost over the next 100 years, it would add around 700m tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere each year, roughly the same amount that is released annually from the world's wetlands and agriculture.
It would effectively double atmospheric levels of the gas, leading to a 10% to 25% increase in global warming, he said.
Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, said the finding was a stark message to politicians to take concerted action on climate change. "We knew at some point we'd get these feedbacks happening that exacerbate global warming, but this could lead to a massive injection of greenhouse gases.
"If we don't take action very soon, we could unleash runaway global warming that will be beyond our control and it will lead to social, economic and environmental devastation worldwide," he said. "There's still time to take action, but not much.
"The assumption has been that we wouldn't see these kinds of changes until the world is a little warmer, but this suggests we're running out of time."
In May this year, another group of researchers reported signs that global warming was damaging the permafrost. Katey Walter of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, told a meeting of the Arctic Research Consortium of the US that her team had found methane hotspots in eastern Siberia. At the hotspots, methane was bubbling to the surface of the permafrost so quickly that it was preventing the surface from freezing over.
Last month, some of the world's worst air polluters, including the US and Australia, announced a partnership to cut greenhouse gas emissions through the use of new technologies.
The deal came after Tony Blair struggled at the G8 summit to get the US president, George Bush, to commit to any concerted action on climate change and has been heavily criticised for setting no targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. |
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