Melting Permafrost Raises Fears of a Temperature Time Bomb

[Ghost Dog]

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2006/09/07/257.html

WASHINGTON -- New research is raising concerns that global warming may be triggering a self-perpetuating climate time bomb trapped in once-frozen permafrost.

As the Earth warms, greenhouse gases once stuck in the long-frozen soil are bubbling into the atmosphere in much larger amounts than previously anticipated, according to a study in the journal Nature published Thursday. Methane trapped in a special type of permafrost is bubbling up at a rate five times faster than originally measured, the journal said.

Scientists are fretting about a global warming vicious cycle that had not been part of their already gloomy climate forecasts: warming already under way thaws permafrost, soil that had been continuously frozen for thousands of years. Thawed permafrost releases methane and carbon dioxide. Those gases reach the atmosphere and help trap heat on Earth in the greenhouse effect. The trapped heat thaws more permafrost, and so on.

"The higher the temperature gets, the more permafrost we melt, the more tendency it is to become a more vicious cycle," said Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "That's the thing that is scary about this whole thing. There are lots of mechanisms that tend to be self-perpetuating and relatively few that tend to shut it off."

/more...

[paparush]

1. What's Bush** gonna say about this zzzzzz huh..er..whut?

Perfamost?
Fermapost?
Farmopast?

What in the tarnation are all of you cookie scientized folks trying to say?

[kurth]

2. Remember the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum:

Ticking Time Bomb
John Atcheson
Baltimore Sun
15 Dec 2004

The Arctic Council's recent report on the effects of global warming in the far north paints a grim picture: global floods, extinction of polar bears and other marine mammals, collapsed fisheries. But it ignored a ticking time bomb buried in the Arctic tundra. There are enormous quantities of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern muds and at the bottom of the seas. These ices, called clathrates, contain 3,000 times as much methane as is in the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

Now here's the scary part. A temperature increase of merely a few degrees would cause these gases to volatilize and "burp" into the atmosphere, which would further raise temperatures, which would release yet more methane, heating the Earth and seas further, and so on. There's 400 gigatons of methane locked in the frozen arctic tundra - enough to start this chain reaction - and the kind of warming the Arctic Council predicts is sufficient to melt the clathrates and release these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Once triggered, this cycle could result in runaway global warming the likes of which even the most pessimistic doomsayers aren't talking about.

An apocalyptic fantasy concocted by hysterical environmentalists? Unfortunately, no. Strong geologic evidence suggests something similar has happened at least twice before. The most recent of these catastrophes occurred about 55 million years ago in what geologists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when methane burps caused rapid warming and massive die-offs, disrupting the climate for more than 100,000 years. The granddaddy of these catastrophes occurred 251 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, when a series of methane burps came close to wiping out all life on Earth. More than 94 percent of the marine species present in the fossil record disappeared suddenly as oxygen levels plummeted and life teetered on the verge of extinction. Over the ensuing 500,000 years, a few species struggled to gain a foothold in the hostile environment. It took 20 million to 30 million years for even rudimentary coral reefs to re-establish themselves and for forests to regrow. In some areas, it took more than 100 million years for ecosystems to reach their former healthy diversity.

Geologist Michael J. Benton lays out the scientific evidence for this epochal tragedy in a recent book, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time. As with the PETM, greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide from increased volcanic activity, warmed the earth and seas enough to release massive amounts of methane from these sensitive clathrates, setting off a runaway greenhouse effect. The cause of all this havoc? In both cases, a temperature increase of about 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit, about the upper range for the average global increase today's models predict can be expected from burning fossil fuels by 2100. But these models could be the tail wagging the dog since they don't add in the effect of burps from warming gas hydrates. Worse, as the Arctic Council found, the highest temperature increases from human greenhouse gas emissions will occur in the arctic regions - an area rich in these unstable clathrates. If we trigger this runaway release of methane, there's no turning back. No do-overs. Once it starts, it's likely to play out all the way...

http://www.sqwalk.com/blog/000235.html

[Boomer]

4. OFHWAD*

*Oh fucking hell we're all doomed

copyright 2006 phantom power

[skids]

7. NWABBAF. n/t

This is how the world ends.

(see sig.)

[jpak]

3. Abstract from this week's issue of Nature

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7107/abs/nature05040.html

Methane bubbling from Siberian thaw lakes as a positive feedback to climate warming

K. M. Walter, S. A. Zimov, J. P. Chanton, D. Verbyla and F. S. Chapin, III


Large uncertainties in the budget of atmospheric methane, an important greenhouse gas, limit the accuracy of climate change projections1,2. Thaw lakes in North Siberia are known to emit methane3, but the magnitude of these emissions remains uncertain because most methane is released through ebullition (bubbling), which is spatially and temporally variable. Here we report a new method of measuring ebullition and use it to quantify methane emissions from two thaw lakes in North Siberia. We show that ebullition accounts for 95 per cent of methane emissions from these lakes, and that methane flux from thaw lakes in our study region may be five times higher than previously estimated3. Extrapolation of these fluxes indicates that thaw lakes in North Siberia emit 3.8 teragrams of methane per year, which increases present estimates of methane emissions from northern wetlands (< 6–40 teragrams per year; refs 1, 2, 4–6) by between 10 and 63 per cent. We find that thawing permafrost along lake margins accounts for most of the methane released from the lakes, and estimate that an expansion of thaw lakes between 1974 and 2000, which was concurrent with regional warming, increased methane emissions in our study region by 58 per cent. Furthermore, the Pleistocene age (35,260–42,900 years) of methane emitted from hotspots along thawing lake margins indicates that this positive feedback to climate warming has led to the release of old carbon stocks previously stored in permafrost.

<need a subscription to view whole article>

[Boomer]

5. This is the scary part, the rest is just details

We show that ebullition accounts for 95 per cent of methane emissions from these lakes, and that methane flux from thaw lakes in our study region may be five times higher than previously estimated.

[applegrove]

6. * WH will probably find a way to burn melted permafrost make money

thus speeding it all up!

[kestrel91316]

8. I hope all this stuff waits for me to get old and die before it

heads south. Just another 3-4 decades, please.............

[skids]

9. It won't.

Sorry to break it to you, but the first wave of impacts is already upon us.

[ramapo]

10. What we might miss...

unfortunately awaits our children...

My kids regard their dad as a bit of a crazy alarmist. They don't quite buy all this global warming stuff. Both are 20ish. Their outlook is interesting and could make a whole discussion topic on its own. I hope for their sake that I'm wrong but I don't believe that'll be the case.

[gulfcoastliberal]

11. Earth is letting loose a major SBD:

She's gonna fart us right off this rock.