Yahoo News 4 Mar 10;
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Methane is leaking into the atmosphere from unstable permafrost in the Arctic Ocean faster than scientists had thought and could worsen global warming, a study said Thursday.
From 2003 to 2008, an international research team led by University of Alaska-Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov surveyed the waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which covers more than 772,200 square miles (two million square kilometers) of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean.
"This discovery reveals a large but overlooked source of methane gas escaping from permafrost underwater, rather than on land," the study said.
"More widespread emissions could have dramatic effects on global warming in the future."
Earlier studies in Siberia had focused on methane escaping from thawing permafrost on land.
Scientists have long thought that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf acted as an impermeable barrier that sealed in methane, a powerful greenhouse gas 30 times more potent that carbon dioxide.
But the research team's observations showed that the permafrost submerged on the shelf is perforated and leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere.
More than 80 percent of the deep water and more than half of surface water had methane levels around eight times higher than found in normal seawater, according to the study published in the journal Science.
The researchers warned that the release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.
"Ocean-bottom permafrost contains vast amounts of carbon, and experts are concerned that its release as methane gas would lead to warmer atmospheric temperatures, thus creating a positive-feedback loop that would lead to more methane escaping from the permafrost and more global warming," they said.
Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, said Shakhova.
Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher, and scientists are concerned because the undersea permafrost "has been showing signs of destabilization already," she added.
"If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions... would be significantly larger."
Geological records indicate that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods.
Methane Bubbles In Arctic Seas Stir Warming Fears
Alister Doyle, PlanetArk 5 Mar 10;
OSLO - Large amounts of a powerful greenhouse gas are bubbling up from a long-frozen seabed north of Siberia, raising fears of far bigger leaks that could stoke global warming, scientists said.
It was unclear, however, if the Arctic emissions of methane gas were new or had been going on unnoticed for centuries -- since before the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century led to wide use of fossil fuels that are blamed for climate change.
The study said about 8 million tonnes of methane a year, equivalent to the annual total previously estimated from all of the world's oceans, were seeping from vast stores long trapped under permafrost below the seabed north of Russia.
"Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap," Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, said in a statement. She co-led the study published in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
The experts measured levels of methane, a gas that can be released by rotting vegetation, in water and air at 5,000 sites on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf from 2003-08. In some places, methane was bubbling up from the seabed.
Previously, the sea floor had been considered an impermeable barrier sealing methane, Shakhova said. Current methane concentrations in the Arctic are the highest in 400,000 years.
GLOBAL WARMING
"No one can answer this question," she said of whether the venting was caused by global warming or by natural factors. But a projected rise in temperatures could quicken the thaw.
"It's good that these emissions are documented. But you cannot say they're increasing," Martin Heimann, an expert at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany who wrote a separate article on methane in Science, told Reuters.
"These leaks could have been occurring all the time" since the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, he said. He wrote that the release of 8 million tonnes of methane a year was "negligible" compared to global emissions of about 440 million tonnes.
Shakhova's study said there was an "urgent need" to monitor the region for possible future changes since permafrost traps vast amounts of methane, the second most common greenhouse gas from human activities after carbon dioxide.
Monitoring could resolve if the venting was "a steadily ongoing phenomenon or signals the start of a more massive release period," according to the scientists, based at U.S., Russian and Swedish research institutions.
The release of just a "small fraction of the methane held in (the) East Siberian Arctic Shelf sediments could trigger abrupt climate warming," they wrote.
The shelf has sometimes been above sea level during the earth's history. When submerged, temperatures rise by 12-17 degrees Celsius (22-31 F) since water is warmer than air. Over thousands of years, that may thaw submerged permafrost.
About 60 percent of methane now comes from human activities such as landfills, cattle rearing or rice paddies. Natural sources such as wetlands make up the rest, along with poorly understood sources such as the oceans, wildfires or termites.
Most studies about methane focus on permafrost on land. But the shelf below the Laptev, East Siberian and Russian part of the Chuckchi sea is three times the size of Siberia's wetlands.
(Editing by Janet Lawrence)
