Permafrost in the soil and methane hydrates deep in the ocean are large reservoirs of ancient carbon.
As soil and ocean temperatures rise, the reservoirs have the potential to break down, releasing enormous quantities of the potent greenhouse gas methane. But would this methane actually make it to the atmosphere?
Researchers at the University of Rochester—including Michael Dyonisius, a graduate student in the lab of Vasilii Petrenko, professor of earth and environmental sciences—and their collaborators studied methane emissions from a period in Earth’s history partly analogous to the warming of Earth today.
Their research, published in Science, indicates that even if methane is released from these large natural stores in response to warming, very little actually reaches the atmosphere.
“One of our take-home points is that we need to be more concerned about the anthropogenic emissions—those originating from human activities—than the natural feedbacks,” Dyonisius says.
What are methane hydrates and permafrost?
When plants die, they decompose into carbon-based organic matter in the soil. In extremely cold conditions, the carbon in the organic matter freezes and becomes trapped instead of being emitted into the atmosphere.
This forms permafrost, soil that has been continuously frozen—even during the summer—for more than one year. Permafrost is mostly found on land, mainly in Siberia, Alaska, and Northern Canada.
Along with organic carbon, there is also an abundance of water ice in permafrost. When the permafrost thaws in rising temperatures, the ice melts, and the underlying soil becomes waterlogged, helping to create low-oxygen conditions—the perfect environment for microbes in the soil to consume the carbon and produce methane.
Methane hydrates, on the other hand, are mostly found in ocean sediments along the continental margins. In methane hydrates, cages of water molecules trap methane molecules inside.
Methane hydrates can only form under high pressures and low temperatures, so they are mainly found deep in the ocean.
If ocean temperatures rise, so will the temperature of the ocean sediments where the methane hydrates are located. The hydrates will then destabilize, fall apart, and release the methane gas.
“If even a fraction of that destabilizes rapidly and that methane is transferred to the atmosphere, we would have a huge greenhouse impact because methane is such a potent greenhouse gas,” Petrenko says. “The concern really has to do with releasing a truly massive amount of carbon from these stocks into the atmosphere as the climate continues to warm.”
Gathering data from ice cores
In order to determine how much methane from ancient carbon deposits might be released to the atmosphere in warming conditions, Dyonisius and his colleagues turned to patterns in Earth’s past.
They drilled and collected ice cores from Taylor Glacier in Antarctica. The ice core samples act like time capsules: they contain tiny air bubbles with small quantities of ancient air trapped inside.
The researchers use a melting chamber to extract the ancient air from the bubbles and then study its chemical composition.
Dyonisius’s research focused on measuring the composition of air from the time of Earth’s last deglaciation, 8,000-15,000 years ago.
“The time period is a partial analog to today, when Earth went from a cold state to a warmer state,” Dyonisius says. “But during the last deglaciation, the change was natural. Now the change is driven by human activity, and we’re going from a warm state to an even warmer state.”
Analyzing the carbon-14 isotope of methane in the samples, the group found that methane emissions from the ancient carbon reservoirs were small. Thus, Dyonisius concludes, “the likelihood of these old carbon reservoirs destabilizing and creating a large positive warming feedback in the present day is also low.”
Dyonisius and his collaborators also concluded that the methane released doesn’t reach the atmosphere in large quantities. The researchers believe this is due to several natural “buffers.”
Buffers protect against release to the atmosphere
In the case of methane hydrates, if the methane is released in the deep ocean, most of it is dissolved and oxidized by ocean microbes before it ever reaches the atmosphere.
If the methane in permafrost forms deep enough in the soil, it may be oxidized by bacteria that eat the methane, or the carbon in the permafrost may never turn into methane and may instead be released as carbon dioxide.
“It seems like whatever natural buffers are in place are ensuring there’s not much methane that gets released,” Petrenko says.
Read rest at Phys.org
It’s 1am. I’m listening to Gordon Lightfoot’s ”Canadian Railroad Trilogy”. ‘There was a time in this fair land when the railway did not run’. The song is an anthem of the human spirit. Today, the railways do not run in Canada. We’re being shredded by parasites.
I ask everyone who visits this website to find and let Lightfoot’s poetry enter your hearts. If you have a heart.
Really? What do you hate about Canada? You’re tearing us asunder.
Pfffft…. There is no such thing as a “greenhouse gas” .. a so-called “greenhouse effect” cannot exist in our known universe. It is a violation of physical laws that govern our universe.
Junk science is fun because it can be proven wrong in so many ways. Anything it relates to has to be wrong.
Got a peer-reviewed study to back up that absurdity?
What does the IPCC do with all these incestuously peer reviewed papers? They file them, then issue their own ‘Summary for Policy Makers’. That’s where the alarmism takes off. Why are their predictions constantly proven to be exaggerations?
There are more than 2 dozen scientific fields that conduct hundreds of studies that touch upon the earth and climate – these range from Atmospheric Chemistry to Glaciology to Marine Biology, etc. Every 5 years or so around 800 of these representative scientists get together to discuss their latest research in OPEN AND PUBLIC FORUMS (even you can attend). This information is reduced down into bite sized chunks that policy makers can understand.
All the research remains available for review and public examination for all time.
Do you have a better way to do this? Just attend the next IPCC and submit your idea.
Take the political footprint out of the process. What’s left?
Peer review in climate change is a joke. One past article on this web site covered hoax articles. This is where articles on climate change were submitted that contained deliberate errors. This included errors in data analysis that even a sophomore in college could spot, or conclusions that had no basis in the articles. All of these hoax articles came to the politically correct conclusion. Of these, 70% were peered reviewed and published. Yet, when facts are presented that undermine the climate change fraud, peer review is held up as a shield against the inconvenient data. You did so with the article,
https://climatechangedispatch.com/study-co2-negligible-role-warming/
We do not need studies to know what is happening in the world. All we have to do is look at real world data. One of the most compelling is that 40% of the warming blamed on man occurred between 1910 and 1941 when the carbon dioxide levels were relatively low and raising very slowly. There are other examples such as the mini ice age, medieval warming period, and roman warming period. We certainly don’t have justification for spending trillions of dollars or impose “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”
The most compelling evidence isn’t the real world data but the reaction of those who support the climate change movement. Data before 1950 has been altered to make things appear colder than it really was, and after 1950 altered to be warmer. This was done by people who are knowledgeable and the only possible motivation is they know the empirical data doesn’t support the climate change fraud. The excuse has been given that the data had errors that need to be correct, but we know this is BS because the data stood for decades and wasn’t altered until it was obvious it didn’t support the climate change dogma.
What is absurd is the notion that carbon dioxide has a significant effect on the climate. This assertion is made to support the politics. So YouKnowWho, what is your motivation? Do you want climate change to justify new taxes, or to be used to destroy free enterprise, or to justify bigger government, or something else? I’ll be honest with you. Though I’m thoroughly convinced that climate change is a fraud, I’m motivate by not wanting to pay very high rates for energy. I’m also not willing to adopt an inferior life style even if the climate change fraud was actually real.
The IPCC conducts it’s business in the open and PUBLIC meetings. The time to find errors is then.
Do you have any SPECIFIC examples? Maybe you can bring them up at the next forum.
You’re backing away, hiding behind your firewalls.
I have already cited specific examples. That 40% of the warming blamed on man occurred between 1910 and 1941 when the carbon dioxide levels were relatively low and raising very slowly.
If you are talking about political motivations, these are very well known. Perhaps you are new to this side of the issue and I don’t fault you for that. Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that the climate change movement was not about climate. It was to transfer the wealth of the industrial nations to the developing nations. I have been following this issue for 17 years and have read thousands of articles from all around the world from all points of view and in different time periods. I have read countless articles that concluded climate change couldn’t be solved within the capitalist system. The obvious political motivation here is the destruction of free enterprise. Don’t ask me to point you to these articles because I wasn’t taking notes at the time.
We are currently in a period of increasing censorship of the climate realist point of view. If you go back in the historical posts on this web site you will find many examples. I seriously doubt that I would be allowed to speak at the IPCC. Even if I could, I can’t afford to go.
The “GeoCarb” satellite was just launched to monitor methane plumes across the globe but we already know that methane gas has been escaping into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate in the Arctic.
This is mainly due to the “awakening” of microbes in the permafrost due to climate change warming.
Actually, when the permafrost melts and the life wakes up, it has been found to be a carbon sink, with all of that life going on.
Melting permafrost results in a spike of CO2 and Methane plus peat fires start that can burn for months which not only dramatically increase co2 but spread black ash onto the sea ice making it melt faster.
If methane is being released as Arctic tundra warms, why is the minimum value always seen in Summer? (per NOAA ESRL, Global Monitoring Division)
“When temperatures are around 32F, the top and bottom layers of permafrost begin to freeze, while the middle layer remains insulated. Microorganisms in this unfrozen middle layer continue to break down organic matter and emit methane many months into the Arctic’s cold period each year.”
The atmosphere is a methane sink. Because when the sun is over the equator, direct light breaks up methane molecules to become CO2 and H2O.
All carbon life forms produce methane when they die and rot (anaerobic decomposition) that is why rubbish tips and stinky compost bins give off methane.
So, the supper wet and cold permafrost is going to start burning due to a one degree increase in the Earth’s temperate. Where has this happened? The same question applies to the idea that more methane is being released. If the small temperature increase we have had so far has had such an impact, then no action by mankind will make a difference.
Krasnoyarsk Siberia was the world’s largest fire in 2019 and it burned for months. Ash was blown into the Arctic sea ice making melted ponds on the ice where ever it landed.
There are many false assumptions in this writing. The piece may dispell the alarmists’ ranting about the tipping point being reached once the methane clathrates dissolve, but the author still rests on the incorrect premise that it’s human-caused carbon dioxide (what he calls “carbon”) that is still of concern to us. Well, we should not be concerned. Carbon dioxide is a non-sequitor in this discussion. We would be better served by trying to reduce the amount of paved surfaces in the world which contribute to rain run-off which leads to sea-level rise.
I fell asleep on top of permafrost, July,1999. I woke up less than two hours later, under the midnight sun. Sorry, Warmists. Caveat Emptor.
Does anybody realize that all of the organic and frozen matter in the permafrost must have been thriving living organisms back when it clearly had to be much warmer than now. Duh.
There ae some people stupid enough to think Cattle produce lots of methane and that’s why they demand we all go vegan over this whole Global Warming/Climate Change Scam I guess thats what comes from a strict vegan diet and belonging to HSUS and PETA
What they do not realize is that CO2 and methane cannot and do not warm Earth’s surface. The upper tropical troposphere is always colder than the surface and any IR directed downward is reflected perforce. In addition, neither of these gases have any significant IR absorption bands. They are transparent to the vast majority of IR frequencies. They are indeed called radiative gases as they serve to cool the climate at night. Also, their half-lives in the atmosphere are both about 5 years. These researchers are wasting their time if their efforts are related to concerns about global warming.