More on the Arctic

In his recent talk Guy McPherson referred to methane bubbling up in the ocean like champagne, In the short search I have made I presume he is referring to this.

Like everything else that is really concerning there is very little to be found on this. Perhaps one of the best sources is a blog called Arctic News

It seems no one wants to talk about this

Huge methane plumes

Russian scientists sampling the waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf have discovered enormous plumes of methane, some more than a kilometer wide, bubbling up from the thawing seabed

Environment 360

13 December, 2011

Igor Semiletov, an oceanographer from the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said a research cruise late this summer detected more than 100 of these extensive methane “fountains” in an area of less than 10,000 square miles. Semiletov, who has been studying the region’s seabed for 20 years, said the scale and volume of the plumes far surpasses anything he had seen previously and could indicate that slushy methane hydrates on the seabed are thawing at an intensifying rate as Arctic Ocean ice disappears and sea temperatures rise. In 2010, Semiletov estimated that the emissions of methane — a powerful heat-trapping gas — bubbling from the seabed in this region were about 8 million tons a year, but he said the recent expedition has shown that methane releases could be far higher. “We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale,” Lemiletov told the UK’s Independent newspaper. Scientists fear that continued warming of the Arctic could release so much methane that the global climate could pass a tipping point and be pushed into an era of rapid warming

Albedo change in the Arctic

Arctic News,

6 July, 2012

Albedo change: Snow cover on the ice reflects between 80% and 90% of sunlight, while the dark ocean without ice cover reflects only 7% of the light, explains Stephen Hudson of the Norwegian Polar Institute. As the sea ice cover decreases, less solar radiation is reflected away from the surface of the Earth in a feedback effect that causes more heat to be absorbed and consequently melting to occur faster still.

Arctic sea ice volumes keep falling. The image below is from the Polar Science Center's Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS, Zhang and Rothrock, 2003).

Since I posted this a reader has sent me some further references.


Here they are:

90 degrees in Winterm -Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Why the Energy-Industrial Elite Has It In for the Planet

Arctic melt releasing ancient methane

Scientists have identified thousands of sites in the Arctic where methane that has been stored for many millennia is bubbling into the atmosphere.

ARCTIC SEA ICE MELTS TO NEAR-RECORD LEVEL

Arctic sea ice melted over the summer to cover the third smallest area on record, US researchers said on Wednesday, warning global warming could leave the region ice free in the month of September 2030.

HUGE METHANE LEAK IN ARCTIC DETECTED

Methane is leaking into the atmosphere from permafrost in the Arctic Ocean and could accelerate global warming.