The month of August was a bad month for climatologist worried about climate change, starting with the news from Russia about the "Siberian crater mystery." Well, the month of August is going out with another jaw dropper, the trouble seems to bubbling up from all around us now.
August started with the melting permafrost in Siberia releasing massive methane gas explosions and as one climatologist put it, "it is a climate time bomb waiting to go off." Methane is one of the worst gases for climate change... and now the other shoe appears to be dropping as under sea methane deposits surrounding all the continents are bubbling up as well.
Scientists may have cracked the giant Siberian crater mystery — and the news isn’t good
By now, you’ve heard of the crater on the Yamal Peninsula. It’s the one that suddenly appeared, yawning nearly 100 feet in diameter, and made several rounds in the global viral media machine. The adjectives most often used to describe it: giant, mysterious, curious. Scientists were subsequently “baffled.” Locals were “mystified.” There were whispers that aliens were responsible. Nearby residents peddled theories of “bright flashes” and “celestial bodies.”
There’s now a substantiated theory about what created the crater. And the news isn’t so good. It may be methane gas, released by the thawing of frozen ground. According to a recent Nature article, “air near the bottom of the crater contained unusually high concentrations of methane — up to 9.6% — in tests conducted at the site on 16 July, says Andrei Plekhanov, an archaeologist at the Scientific Centre of Arctic Studies in Salekhard, Russia. Plekhanov, who led an expedition to the crater, says that air normally contains just 0.000179% methane.”
The scientist said the methane release may be related to Yamal’s unusually hot summers in 2012 and 2013, which were warmer by an average of 5 degrees Celsius. “As temperatures rose, the researchers suggest, permafrost thawed and collapsed, releasing methane that had been trapped in the icy ground,” the report stated.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Hundreds of Methane Plumes Erupting Along East Coast
In an unexpected discovery, hundreds of gas plumes bubbling up from the seafloor were spotted during a sweeping survey of the U.S. Atlantic Coast. Even though ocean explorers have yet to test the gas, the bubbles are almost certainly methane, researchers report today (Aug. 24) in the journal Nature Geoscience.
"We don't know of any explanation that fits as well as methane," said lead study author Adam Skarke, a geologist at Mississippi State University in Mississippi State.
Between North Carolina's Cape Hatteras and Massachusetts' Georges Bank, 570 methane seeps cluster in about eight regions, according to sonar and video gathered by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration ship Okeanos Explorer between 2011 and 2013. The vast majority of the seeps dot the continental slope break, where the seafloor topography swoops down toward the Atlantic Ocean basin. [Gallery: Amazing images of Atlantic Methane Seeps]
http://news.yahoo.com/...