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A very important research effort has been under way during recent summers in the warming, increasingly ice-free shallows off Russia's Siberian coast. There, an international array of scientists has been investigating widening areas of open water that are disgorging millions of tons of methane each year.
Given that methane, molecule for molecule, has at least 20 times the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide, it's important to get a handle on whether these are new releases, the first foretaste of some great outburst from thawing sea-bed stores of the gas, or simply a longstanding phenomenon newly observed.
If you read the Independent of Britain, you'd certainly be thinking the worst. The newspaper has led the charge in fomenting worry over the gas emissions, with portentous, and remarkably similar, stories in 2008 and this week.
If you read geophysical journals and survey scientists tracking past and future methane emissions, you get an entirely different picture:
A paper published in Dec. 6 in the Journal of Geophysical Research appears to confirm pretty convincingly that the gas emissions seen in recent years are from a thawing process that has been under way for 8,000 years - since seas rose sufficiently to cover the near-shore seabed. Sharp warming of the sea in the region since 1985 has clearly had an influence on the seabed, according to the paper, led by Igor Dmitrenko of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany.
Methane Time Bomb in Arctic Seas
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By Andrew C. Revkin
The New York Times, December 14, 2011
Straight to the Source
