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Methane “chimneys” likely to exasperate global warming

I had heard about the likelihood that global warming could cause the release of frozen methane at the bottom of the ocean, leading to a rapid cycle of global warming but had never known of it as anything more then speculation and something that would happen in the future. Scientists have now documented “Methane Chimneys” along the northern coast of Russia .

Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University in Sweden, one of the leaders of the expedition, described the scale of the methane emissions in an email exchange sent from the Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi.

“We had a hectic finishing of the sampling programme yesterday and this past night,” said Dr Gustafsson. “An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface. These ‘methane chimneys’ were documented on echo sounder and with seismic [instruments].”

At some locations, methane concentrations reached 100 times background levels. These anomalies have been seen in the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, covering several tens of thousands of square kilometres, amounting to millions of tons of methane, said Dr Gustafsson. “This may be of the same magnitude as presently estimated from the global ocean,” he said. “Nobody knows how many more such areas exist on the extensive East Siberian continental shelves.

I’m certainly not an alarmist but this may be a warning sign that we’ve gone a bit too far with our “greenhouse gases” and have begun an irreversible cycle of heating the temperature of the Earth.

© 2008 Genius Steve.