Arctic Methane Release May Have Begun

billvon said:
Hmm. I think this has been going on for at least 10 years; I've seen articles going back to 2010 talking about large methane releases both from clathrates and tundra.
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That's interesting. I had read something about tundra but the clathrate thing was new to me.
 
exchemist said:
I had read something about tundra but the clathrate thing was new to me.
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It's been called the "methane bomb" for a long time now, since before Gore's documentary, and has been one of the more frequently invoked and discussed apocalyptic futures among the alarmists - including here on this forum, years ago, by me and others - e.g. #925

(imho Billy had the main point there, in that 7 year old thread: granted the methane bomb is low probability, the fact remains that it is becoming significantly more probable as the CO2 buildup continues at its current rapid pace - and how much of a chance would a sane person be willing to take on a disaster of that magnitude? I want odds against in six figures at least.)
 
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iceaura said:
It's been called the "methane bomb" for a long time now, since before Gore's documentary, and has been one of the more frequently invoked and discussed apocalyptic futures among the alarmists - including here on this forum, years ago, by me and others - e.g. #925

(imho Billy had the main point there, in that 7 year old thread: granted the methane bomb is low probability, the fact remains that it is becoming significantly more probable as the CO2 buildup continues at its current rapid pace - and how much of a chance would a sane person be willing to take on a disaster of that magnitude? I want odds against in six figures at least.)
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I knew the clathrates were there. That is common knowledge.

What I did not know was that they are already starting to release significant amounts of methane.
 
exchemist said:
What I did not know was that they are already starting to release significant amounts of methane.
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And so I linked to a discussion of that, seven years ago on this forum - it's part of the past twenty or thirty years of "alarmist" discourse. From 2017: https://www.newsweek.com/methane-boiling-sea-discovered-siberia-1463766
From 2008, via Wiki:
Research carried out in 2008 in the Siberian Arctic found millions of tonnes of methane being released[49][50][51][52][53] with concentrations in some regions reaching up to 100 times above normal.[54]

While investigating the East Siberian Arctic Ocean during the Summer, researchers were surprised by the high concentration of methane, and theorized that it was being released from pockets of methane clathrates embedded in ice on the sea floor which had been destabilized by warmer water.[55]
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Concern about this is what was being labeled "alarmism" in the US media - and on discussion forums such as this one - years ago. One reason it bothered me was the specious and shallow, poorly considered and dismissive, nature of the reassurances by the media "experts" and respectable scientific establishment - the most common dismissal was by observing that diffusion of sufficient atmospheric heat through the insulating layers of water and sediment would take centuries, so the clathrates were largely isolated and safe. That simplistic reassurance overlooked even such obvious factors as changes in ocean currents, marine landslides and other AGW-fostered instabilities (sea level, fresh water flow, seismic consequences of melting glaciers, storm turbulence changes, etc etc etc), and feedback loops during the melting of small portions of large clathrate deposits.

Complacency among experts has become a pet peeve of mine in general` - this has been one of the nagging examples over the decades. That's all. Nothing else implied.
 
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