The “sleeping giant” of methane “woke up” in Siberia



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Climate change, increase in average temperatures, more frequent catastrophic storms, desertification of areas, lack of drinking water and resources … Everything is locked into one situation: “Greenhouse effect”. Human activity is intensifying the situation, accelerating natural processes on the planet. According to The Guardian, scientists have recently discovered a huge source of methane release in eastern Siberia, which is unknown to what extent it will affect the “greenhouse effect.” It is the release of large amounts of methane from the reservoir known as the “sleeping giant of the carbon cycle.”

High levels of strong gas, which amplifies the greenhouse effect, have been detected at a depth of 350 meters in Laptov Sea near Russia, raising concern among researchers that a new climate feedback loop could have been triggered that could accelerate global warming.

Large amounts of methane in the area

Slope sediments in the Arctic contain a large amount of frozen methane and other gases, known as hydrates. Methane has a warming effect 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide and lasts for more than 20 years. The United States Geological Survey has previously reported on destabilization of the water. Arctic as one of the four most serious scenarios of abrupt climate change.

The international team of the Russian research ship R / V Akademik Keldysh said that most of the bubbles were dissolving in the water, but methane levels at the surface were four to eight times higher than would normally be expected and this evaporated.

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“Right now, it is unlikely to have a significant effect on global warming, but the thing is, this process has already been activated.” This methane hydrate system in eastern Siberia has been disrupted and the process will continue. ” said Swedish scientist Janrjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University in a satellite call from the ship.

Scientists: that’s part of a perennial International mission to study slopes – stressed that his conclusions were preliminary. The scale of the methane emissions won’t be confirmed until they go back, analyze the data, and publish their studies in a scientific journal.

However, the potentially destabilized discovery of frozen methane raises concerns that a new tipping point has been reached that could increase the rate of global warming.

With Arctic temperatures now more than doubling the world average, the question of when, or even if, they will be released into the atmosphere has been a subject of considerable uncertainty in climate models.

Your 60-member team Academic Keldysh He believes they are the first to confirm that methane release is already underway over a wide slope area of ​​about 600 km offshore.

Methane release at six points

At six monitoring points on a slope of 150 km and 10 km wide, they saw clouds of bubbles being released from the sediment.

In a place on the slope of the Laptov Sea at a depth of about 300 meters, found methane concentrations of up to 1,600 nanometers per liter, which is 400 times higher than expected.

THE Igor Semiletov, from the Russian Academy of Sciences, which is the ship’s chief scientist, said the landfills were “significantly larger” than anything previously found. “The discovery of the launch of active hydrated lateral grids is very important and unknown until now,” he said. “This is a new page.” They can have serious climatic consequences, but we need more studies to confirm this. “

The most likely cause of instability is the influx of warm currents from the Atlantic into the eastern Arctic. Is “Atlanticization”, as scientists call it, it is driven by human climate disorder.

For the second year in a row, his team found craters in the shallow waters of the Laptev Sea and eastern Siberia spewing bubbles of methane, reaching sea levels tens to hundreds of times higher than normal. This is similar to the craters and sinkholes mentioned for its tundra. Siberian inland in the fall.

Temperatures in Siberia were 5 degrees Celsius higher than the average from January to June this year, an anomaly likely caused by man-made methane and carbon dioxide emissions. Last winter’s sea ice melted unusually early. This winter’s frost has yet to start and is already delayed compared to any other year.

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