Arctic Climate Threat--Methane

Arctic permafrost is already thawing, creating lakes that emit methane. The heat-trapping gas could dramatically accelerate global warming. How big is the threat? What can be done? I have written about this particular subject before but it bears repeating to stress the importance of becoming concerned and involved in the search for ways to slow global warming.

      

Continue to Site >> Site will load in 1 seconds

Methane Gas (white) rising from an Arctic lake bottom is frozen into ice that is forming across the surface

In Brief

• Methane bubbling up into the atmosphere from thawing permafrost that underlies numerous Arctic lakes appears to be hastening global warming.
• New estimates indicate that by 2100 thawing permafrost could boost emissions of the potent greenhouse gas 20 to 40 percent beyond what would be produced by all natural and man-made sources.
• The only realistic way to slow the thaw is for humankind to limit climate warming by reducing our carbon dioxide emissions.

  In northern Russia....Siberia, the land of a million lakes, there is a  stirring giant that could greatly speed up global warming. Many scientific expeditions into this extremely rugged area by American  scientists  and others have helped us to understand how much of the perennially frozen ground, known as permafrost, in Siberia and across the Arctic is thawing, or close to thawing, and how much methane the process could generate. The question grips us—and many scientists and policy makers—because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, packing 25 times more heating power, molecule for molecule, than carbon dioxide. If the permafrost thaws rapidly because of global warming worldwide, the planet could get hotter more quickly than most models now predict. Our data, combined with complementary analyses by others, are revealing troubling trends.
The  lakes are releasing the gases trapped at the bottom by ice for millenia. Now they  are bubbling up to the surface and heating up a planet already in a  climatic crisis. All this is happening while the countries of the world squabble about an agreement to cut back on carbon emissions.