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Methane emissions in the Arctic – an update - 02/02/2019
Yesterday a video came out from Yale University and USGS telling us that methane from the permafrost is a potential problem in the future. It also said the methane clathrate gun is just a "nothing burger", a conspiracy theory.
So does that mean that we can just pack up and go for a holiday, assured in the knowledge that there is nothing to worry about?
I prefer, more -and-more every day NOT to listen exclusively to the scientists (certainly not all of them!) but to take my own counsel.
Just by looking at the data from ostensibly trustworthy sources we are able to divine what might be going on. It is all that we can do as we are not on the ground.
But neither are the "experts".
So let's go through the data.
Firstly there is the data from CAMS (Copernicus) which appears to have been changed yet again in that I was unable to select the beginning date for the data, essentially meaning I should be recording this every day so it is not lost.
So does that mean that we can just pack up and go for a holiday, assured in the knowledge that there is nothing to worry about?
I prefer, more -and-more every day NOT to listen exclusively to the scientists (certainly not all of them!) but to take my own counsel.
Just by looking at the data from ostensibly trustworthy sources we are able to divine what might be going on. It is all that we can do as we are not on the ground.
But neither are the "experts".
So let's go through the data.
Firstly there is the data from CAMS (Copernicus) which appears to have been changed yet again in that I was unable to select the beginning date for the data, essentially meaning I should be recording this every day so it is not lost.
The whole question of sea temperature remains of sea surface temperatures where there is ice and what this implies for the formation of good-quality ice in seas that appear, from the data, to be hovering around zero despite much colder atmospheric temperatures.
I demonstrate and discuss this in the following video.
Here is the temperature near Novaya Zemlya
And the sea surface temperatures.
Here is data for sea surface temperature anomalies. They do not provide data in areas that are covered in ice.
Here are the temperatures according to Climate Reanalyzer
https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#sstanom
And here is the sea ice thickness as measured by the US. Navy
And here is the sea ice thickness as measured by the US. Navy
Comparing the data sets from CAMS, Climate Reanalyser and the US Navy site, it looks that the methane plumes from the shallow seabed can penetrate up to 1.25m of ice thickness. Which sounds illogical, so we can extrapolate that suggest that ice thickness measurements of under 1.5m are in fact not continuous ice, but an average where there are lots of shallow spots.
ReplyDeleteEither way, it doesn't bode well for the summer ice, when the refreezing ice the summer ice depends on is only this thin, and leaking methane.