Stockholm climate researcher warns permafrost is leaking methane
The New York Times recently featured comments from Stockholm researcher Örjan Gustafsson as part of its coverage of a potential major environmental catastrophe that will rapidly accelerate global warming.
The NY Times reports that climate researchers have discovered that pure methane – gas bubbling up from underwater vents and escaping into the air – is adding to the global warming gases accumulating in the atmosphere.
Scientists examining areas in northwest Canada, Siberia and elsewhere in the Arctic believe massive amounts of pure methane locked in the Arctic permafrost and seabed are escaping. If right, this could have calamitous ramifications for the earth’s climate.
Chris Burn, Canada's pre-eminent permafrost expert, who has studied the Arctic region for almost three decades, meticulously chronicling the changes in the tundra, told the New York Times: ''If we lost just one percent of the carbon in permafrost today, we'd be close to a year's contributions from industrial sources.”
The effect on the planet’s fragile ecosystem would be catastrophic.
Örjan Gustafsson, researcher at Stockholm’s Department of Applied Environmental Science (ITM) agreed that the northern region of the planet contains enough potential methane and carbon dioxide to cause abrupt climate change. He explained, however, that: “the scientific community is quite split on how fast the permafrost can thaw.”
Last year, Gustafsson spent time aboard the Jacob Smirnitsky, a Russian research ship, and discovered with other colleagues large amounts of methane being released into the atmosphere from frozen seabed stores off the north coast of Siberia.
Conventional thought has previously been that the permafrost 'lid' on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf cap hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place.
However, as Gustafsson and colleagues discovered last year, there is now increasing evidence that the permafrost lid is perforated and leaking methane.
Just what ramifications this has for the planet remains to be seen.
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Text: Jon Buscall
Content owner: External Relations Office
Created:
September 7, 2009
by
Paul Parker
Updated:
September 7, 2009
by
Paul Parker
