Methane Gas: The Great Escape

It’s been talked about for years, and now it’s really happening — methane, a global warming gas far more deadly than carbon dioxide, is escaping from the Arctic seabed in vast quantities, adding to the atmospheric burden. What effect will it have on our planet’s climate?

Arctic Ice - from The IndependentUK newspaper The Independent led with what it described as an exclusive story on 23rd September 2008: The Methane Time Bomb. Science Editor Steve Connor reports that Arctic scientists have discovered what’s described as a new global warming threat — the melting permafrost is releasing into the atmosphere millions of tons of a gas 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide.

This is not a new idea — Whitley Strieber‘s Unknown Country web site has raised the subject numerous times over the past few years, and his 1999 book The Coming Global Superstorm discussed the contribution that methane released into the atmosphere would make to the conditions necessary for the formation of a Superstorm that could dump billions of tons of snow onto the northern hemisphere, causing another mini-ice age. What this new report brings is hard evidence that such methane releases are real — and that they’re happening right now.

Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species, writes Steve Connor. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia’s northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane -– sometimes at up to 100 times background levels –- over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through “methane chimneys” rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a “lid” to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

Methane Gas Deposits - USGS 1996

If it’s happening in Siberian waters, it’s probably happening elsewhere — there are deposits of methane clathrate (also called methane hydrate, or methane ice) locked up in various undersea locations around the globe which must surely be at risk of escaping. Those in high latitudes have, until now, been kept locked down by the coldness of the surrounding permafrost conditions of the seabed, while deposits in other, more temperate locations are restrained by the relatively cold water currents circulating immediately on top of the strata where they’re entombed — but those cold currents are warming up, and once they reach a certain critical temperature, the methane will begin to expand. Eventually it will overcome the pressure of the water above and escape through fissures in the rock. Some of the methane will dissolve in the sea water — but where the gas has sufficient pressure, it will rise swiftly through the water and escape into the atmosphere. That’s what the scientists have been observing in the Siberian waters.

Methane gas also escapes from boggy and peaty landscapes, such as those in high latitude Russia and Canada, as the permafrost melts in higher temperatures. Overall, the Earth’s crust contains huge amounts of methane. When it gets into the atmosphere, it acts much more powerfully as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, though it doesn’t persist as long. But when it does eventually break down, it turns into water — and our old friend carbon dioxide, so even after it’s gone, it still has a sting in its tail.

What does the release of all this methane mean for our immediate future?

During the third and final part of a recent BBC2 documentary series called Earth — The Climate Wars, Dr. Iain Stewart spoke to Professor Jim White, who was a member of the US Geological Survey project in the late 1990s which collected ice cores from the Greenland ice sheet. Analysis of the chemical composition of these ice cores provides a window on the climatic conditions that prevailed when the ice was laid down, going back many thousands — even hundreds of thousands — of years. Dr. Stewart was particularly interested in finding out what happened around 11,000 years ago, at the end of a period known as the Younger Dryas. He visited Professor White in Denver, where the ice cores are now stored. Together they examined an ice core that covered the transition from the 1,000-year-long cold, dry Younger Dryas period into the next, warmer period known as the Holocene:

IS: So we’ve come out the last ice age, it’s started to warm up, and then we dip into this 1,000 year cold stage, the Younger Dryas. What does this core tell us about how it ends?

JW: As you come along in this particular core you see layers that are roughly half a centimetre thick, and then right here, these layers become about a centimetre thick all the way up the core. And that is a fundamental change in the amount of snowfall that occurs … this is the Younger Dryas cold period, [and] right here is the end of the Younger Dryas — you can actually put a line right there in the ice.

IS: So — right on that divide there?

JW: Right on that divide right there.

IS (narration): In the cold dry period of the Younger Dryas, the layers are cloudy, and so thin they seem to merge into each other. But then, there’s a sudden transition to clearer, thicker layers. These thicker bands show there was much heavier snowfall. And when they analysed the chemistry of the ice, it revealed the temperature had jumped by five degrees.

IS: So how quick is that transition?

JW: Well, if you look at it, basically one year.

IS: Wow.

JW: Yes. There’s enough ‘noise’ in here that one can argue it’s maybe one to three years — but it’s not one to five years and it’s certainly not one to ten years. It’s right around one year.

IS: So we go from essentially an ice age, in the Younger Dryas, to the warm period immediately afterwards within a year.

JW: In terms of snowfall, yes. It takes a little longer for the climate system to warm up.

IS (narration): The Earth’s climate was meant to take thousands of years to change. But the ice core showed that the climate could switch from an ice age to warm conditions in less than a human lifetime. And as they looked further back in time, there was more to come.

IS: So is this the only abrupt change you find?

JW: No. No, this ice core contains a couple of dozen abrupt climate changes that have warmings that are as fast and environmental changes that are as drastic as the one you see here.

IS: So are these rapid shifts characteristic of the climate system?

JW: It’s clearly not an artefact in the system, it’s clearly not just a once or twice kind of thing that maybe was a meteorite or something like that or a volcano — this is an inherent, intrinsic part of the climate system.

IS (narration): The discovery of sudden, rapid climate change was a scientific revolution. It meant that the climate was capable of sudden jumps in a time scale that modern civilization has never had to deal with.

IS: And — do you get genuinely scared about what that possibly means for us if we encounter it in the future?

JW: Yes. I don’t think anybody could not get scared. If you understood just how fast that was and how big this change was, just how fundamental it was — if something like that happened to us — and it’s important to recognise we’ve not seen anything like it — if something like that happened to us today, we would probably not be able to grow enough food, we would not have enough fresh water, it would challenge even the most industrialised society to adapt. And that is scary.

IS (narration) The most frightening thing is that no-one knows what causes the climate to change so quickly. So scientists began to worry that the changes already underway as a result of global warming could accelerate and turn out to be just as fast. It’s impossible not to look at that core and see that change from an ice age into a warm world over the course of a season or two, and realise that we could see climate change not in some distant future, but in our lifetime. And that’s made the debate much, much more urgent.

What strikes me here is the significance of past events depicted in the ice cores: the Earth had previously experienced a true Ice Age during the Pleistocene epoch, which began around 1.8 million years ago and lasted until about 11,500 years ago. During this time, repeated glaciation periods came and went in varying degrees as the planet warmed and cooled. Then came the Younger Dryas, a period lasting about 1,000 years when the planet was generally colder and dryer again. At the end of this period, the temperature at the Arctic rose very rapidly — by as much as five degrees — and the planet as a whole then began entering a warmer (interglacial) period. But the amount of snowfall in the northern hemisphere also suddenly became much heavier at this time — over the course of just one year.

This can be interpreted as a scenario where the sudden rise in temperature across the Arctic region caused huge reserves of methane — locked up on the seabed since before the Pleistocene epoch, at least two million years previously — to escape, adding to the greenhouse effect. This, in turn, would have forced temperatures to rise even more sharply, releasing even more methane, in a loop feedback effect. At a certain point the temperature, oceanic and atmospheric conditions could have converged to trigger a Superstorm — during which, in just one season, the northern hemisphere became covered once again in deep snow and ice that persisted for many years. As colder temperatures took hold once more, regions of permafrost re-formed, locking up the methane again until another sufficiently warm period arrived that melted the permafrost — i.e. what the scientists are now observing in Siberian waters.

The Coming Global SuperstormIt’s worth repeating here what Whitley Strieber and Art Bell wrote in their book:

By definition, a superstorm would involve an entire hemisphere. Its winds would reach extreme velocities, possibly in excess of two hundred miles an hour.

The storm would be triggered by a sudden increase in Arctic temperatures at the surface — exactly the kind of warm snap that could occur at any time during the global warming scenario presently unfolding — combined with extreme cold aloft. This warm flow of air would heat an ocean surface already affected by a loss of salinity due to polar melt and runoff from Greenland. The lack of salt in the water would cause it to take on heat quickly. At that point, the flow of the North Atlantic current would suddenly change, dropping south.

When this happened, the ultracold air trapped above the arctic by the warm airflow would slide southward, with a violent outcome.

The storm would last until the ocean cooled enough for the flow of the current to be reestablished. Before that happened, there would be a massive blizzard or series of blizzards that would dump billions of tons of snow across a fifth of the earth’s surface. When the sun finally did return, the huge increase in the earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, caused by the snow, would cause a dramatic drop in temperature. Whether the ice would melt or persist across the next summer would depend on its depth. If it persisted, a cooling trend of some duration would result. There would even be a possibility that a new ice age would begin …

The evidence that long-term changes in climate do take place is irrefutable. The ice keeps coming back, and we aren’t sure why. But something acts as the trigger, and we know that this event is a sudden one.

– The Coming Global Superstorm, Whitley Strieber & Art Bell, Pocket Books, 2000, pp/102-103
(Repeated from my post Climate Change: Competing Theories)

What came first, though, at the end of the Younger Dryas — the temperature rise, or the methane release? Surely, if the planet was cool enough to keep the methane safely locked up until that point, then methane release cannot have been responsible for the temperature increase. But there could have been many other factors simultaneously at work, such as the long-term cyclic variability in solar output and the effect of cosmic rays on cloud cover; the variability in strength or even the temporary cessation of the Atlantic Gulf Stream; the emission of gases into the atmosphere from super-volcanoes; and other epic, relatively one-off events such as significant meteorite impacts which may have triggered seismic eruptions that affected entire continents and released deadly gases from deep within the Earth.

It has to be admitted that the picture’s far from complete. Today we know that the average global temperature is exhibiting a rising trend, even though we still can’t fully account for the reasons behind it. And the evidence of those ice cores cannot be ignored: no matter what triggered the Younger Dryas temperature rise, it shows that it is possible for the northern hemisphere to be subjected to a catastrophic cooling event within a geological blink of an eye — that is to say, over the course of just one year — as part of a general global warming trend. Searching for evidence to support that conjecture has been at the heart of my research during the past year or so.

I hate to say it, but I fear I may be edging closer to the answer.

Read my Climate Change posts in chronological order by using the Climate Change Log.

Still No Sunspots

The current Solar Cycle — an indicator of the sun’s magnetic activity, which in turn is believed to influence our planet’s climate — is confounding astronomers by resolutely refusing to conform to predictions. There should be increasing numbers of sunspots blemishing the sun’s surface by now, but there are none. What does this trend indicate for our future?

According to Michael Asher, writing in Daily Tech on 1 September 2008, The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.

I wrote about the lack of sunspot activity back in March 2008, in There Goes The Sun — when I quoted from another Michael Asher article highlighting the sudden drop in global average temperature and its possible link to the lack of solar activity since the beginning of Solar Cycle 24, which kicked off at the start of 2008. By now, the sun should be exhibiting an increasingly frequent display of sunspots as it heads to a peak of activity around 2012 — but it isn’t.

Instead, reports Michael, this year has been extraordinarily long and quiet, with the first seven months averaging a sunspot number of only 3. August followed with none at all. The astonishing rapid drop of the past year has defied predictions, and caught nearly all astronomers by surprise. He says that When the sun is active, it’s not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop to near-zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins. This time, they haven’t.

Sunspot Numbers Graph - from Wikimedia Commons via Daily Tech

Graph from Wikimedia Commons, via Daily Tech

Sunspot data have been collected since 1749. The last time such a quiet entire month was recorded was in June 1913. Three events in the past 1,000 years have occurred where low sunspot activity had a measurable effect on the Earth’s climate. The Dalton, Maunder, and Spörer Minimums have all led to rapid cooling — the Maunder Minimum was what led to the Little Ice Age, when the European and North American continents suffered around 100 years of wan summers and freezing winters.

So is the general consensus changing? Are we moving from a global warming scenario to one of global cooling? Well, the jury’s still out — but it’s not surprising.

On the one hand, our planet has undoubtedly been warming up at an alarming rate recently. The Arctic ice pack has experienced a summer melt this year which almost matches 2007′s record melt. The legendary North-West Passage has been completely ice-free and navigable by commercial vessels for the second year running. This is causing increasing concern about the potential for conflict as countries rush to claim their alleged share of the oil and gas reserves that are coming within reach as the ice recedes. Senior US Coast Guard commander Rear Admiral Gene Brooks, in charge of the Coast Guard’s vast Alaska region, appealed for a diplomatic deal. “The potential is there with undetermined boundaries and great wealth for conflict, or competition. There’s always a risk of conflict,” he told BBC News. He added that this was especially the case “where you do not have established, delineated, agreed-upon borders”.

On the other hand, the same report makes the observation that the melt may also have an effect on the weather far beyond the Arctic region itself, as white reflective ice makes way for darker ocean that absorbs more solar radiation. At America’s northernmost climate research post, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), station chief Dan Endres warns of the development of more severe weather systems. ‘As the icecap retreats, and we see changing weather patterns here, it could translate into stronger storms – we’ll see more severity in the storms we have, that’s part of climate change. And these storms, the weather patterns, often start in the Arctic and move south.’

Indeed, that’s the nub of Whitley Strieber and Art Bell‘s argument in their Superstorm theory: Arctic conditions may spiral out of control to such an extent that new, hitherto unobserved weather patterns could emerge that may trigger violent snowstorms across the northern hemisphere, despite — or in fact because of — what’s generally called global warming. Even though average temperatures across the northern hemisphere might be quite high at the time, a vast carpet of snow suddenly deposited across huge areas of Europe, Russia, Canada and North America would reflect enormous amounts of solar energy back into space, slowing that same snow cover’s melt. This would allow further falls of snow to accumulate as more normal weather patterns — influenced by the much colder atmospheric and ground temperatures — resumed, and much of Earth would be in the grip of a period of intense cold that could last for many hundreds of years.

Because Strieber and Bell work on science’s edgy frontier where many researchers fear to tread, their Superstorm theory is dismissed by most, if not all, climatologists. The sun’s current lack of activity, though, has certainly caught scientists’ attention. If it continues, it may well adversely influence our climate enough to neutralise the current warming trend and initiate another “Little Ice Age”. Under these conditions, it’s doubtful whether the atmospheric energy imbalance necessary for Superstorm formation would prevail.

What is certain is that the sun will become more normally active again at some point in the future, and this, in turn, will inject more energy into the complex systems responsible for rising global temperatures and — assuming we haven’t sufficiently curtailed our emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by then (judging by our current efforts, it’s very doubtful) — the whole warming mechanism will resume, eventually leading to a point where the necessary conditions for Superstorm formation are present once more.

Either way, it seems to this observer that the odds of our future involving some kind of Big Freeze are shortening dramatically.

Read my Climate Change posts in chronological order by using the Climate Change Log.

Being Economical With The Truth

Is there no such thing as human-induced climate change? Is it all just a natural blip? The Telegraph‘s Christopher Booker seems to think so. Meanwhile, the Unknown Country web site has put solar radiation back in the frame as a candidate for climate disruption — but have they each arrived at these differing positions by cherry-picking the available information to suit their own agendas?

Al GoreIf Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are to be believed, the debate about whether or not global warming is caused by human activity (what’s now called Anthropogenic Global Warming, or AGW) is all-but solved. We are the culprits — at least to a 90% certainty, given the current evidence. Our continuing output of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere is dangerously upsetting the delicate balance of the planet’s climate and is leading to global warming. The most obvious physical evidence for this is the rate at which Arctic sea ice appears to have been melting during the past few years.

Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice AreaHowever, Christopher Booker, writing in the Telegraph on 4th February 2008 (an article since moved to Booker’s online Notebook and re-dated 18 April 2008), questions this evidence. He points out that while news outlets such as the BBC were keen to report the December 2007 findings on Arctic sea ice loss (which I also quoted in my post The Maya And The Arctic Meltdown), which showed that the summer of 2007 heralded the biggest loss of Arctic sea ice since 1980 (down to 4.2 million sq. km), they’ve been less keen to report that by February 2008, the winter sea ice had recovered to an area of almost 13 million sq. km again — as shown by figures and graphs released by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Mr. Booker feels that these findings have been conveniently ignored by the “warmists” who would rather suppress such information because, he implies, it harms their cause.

Minimum Arctic Sea Ice Extent 2005 and 2007, With 30-Year AverageMy reading of the situation is that the scientists quoted in the article to which I referred fully expect the sea ice to return each winter. They also said that what will help determine the extent of the summer melt in 2008 and in future years will be, amongst other things, the thickness (or perhaps I should say thinness) of that returning winter sea ice and how it’s affected by the warm water advected from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans into the Arctic region. Personally, I will not be surprised to hear, later this year, that the Arctic sea ice has once again retreated to minimal levels — perhaps even more so than in 2007. Mr. Booker, meanwhile, seems happy to use this return of the winter sea ice to dismiss the notion of any form of climate change. I infer from the tone of his article that he’s of the opinion that whatever’s going on, it’s much more likely to be part of a natural cycle. It seems to me he’s the one who’s filtered the available information to suit his own purposes.

Stormy WeatherBut then, I would feel like that. I’m not a “warmist”, but I have no doubt something very bad is going on with the climate, so I’m dismayed when I read articles that seek to undermine that position. My main concern is not about whether it’s anthropogenically induced or a natural phenomenon. Whatever’s causing it, I think we should be preparing for a sudden, nasty shock when we reach a “tipping point” and things change very quickly indeed.

I try to avoid using the term “global warming” too much when writing about this subject (unless I’m quoting someone else who said it), because I think it’s a misnomer. Climate change, or climate disruption, are more accurate terms in my view. The planet may be growing continually warmer (and there is, as you might expect, considerable dispute even about this — see David Whitehouse‘s article, Has Global Warming Stopped?, published online on 19th December 2007 by New Statesman as an example), but that doesn’t necessarily mean our future climate here in the northern hemisphere will simply continue to feel warmer than it has in the past, or warmer than it already is now.

I worry that it may suddenly become very much cooler. (That makes me a coolist, I suppose.) This is based on articles and research I’ve read online and in books and other publications — and on a gut feeling. Hardly scientific, I know, but that’s why I’m trying to better understand the incredibly complex processes underlying climatic balance.

Our sun has a major influence on global climate — and there appears to be a major and unexpected change taking place on the sun, according to Whitley Strieber’s Unknown Country web site. In my post Climate Change: Sunspots? Or Us? I wrote about some research, reported by BBC News Online, that appeared to break the theoretical link between solar activity and global warming. Recently, Unknown Country published information on its Superstorm QuickWatch page that put solar activity back on my radar — not as a cause of global warming, but global cooling.

Here again, though, perhaps all is not quite as it seems.

Jan 4th 2008 Sunspot - from Spaceweather.com (click for larger image)I give a lot of credence to the information this web site provides, so I was disappointed to find an inaccuracy in its reporting on this subject. Inferring that the sun is possibly about to enter an unusually quiet phase, the site said that despite the appearance of a high-latitude reverse polarity sunspot on December 14, 2007, the sun, as of February [2008], remained devoid of the sunspots that would signal the beginning of the next solar maximum. However, according to information archived at SpaceWeather.com, this statement is not true — its archives show that while the December activity caused a good deal of excitement amongst the solar physics community who’ve been looking out for the first “official” sunspot to mark the beginning of Solar Cycle 24, the December activity turned out not to be the hoped-for sign — because it never developed into a sunspot. However, there was a further outbreak, sighted on 4th January 2008, which did become a sunspot and in doing so it did officially kick off Solar Cycle 24 (pictured — click for larger image). I hope this minor inaccuracy was merely an oversight by the Unknown Country team that will soon be corrected. They’re right, however, in saying that things have been quiet since Solar Cycle 24 began — the SpaceWeather.com site’s archives show that no other high-latitude, reverse polarity sunspots have developed since that first one in January. This possibly ominous sign gives the Unknown Country team the collywobbles — and, in turn, me too — though SpaceWeather.com doesn’t think it’s unusual.

The Sun, 19th February 2008 - from Spaceweather.comNotwithstanding their date error, the general thrust of the Unknown Country piece elaborates on solar activity’s effect on our climate, and it makes sobering reading. Normally, it says, the appearance of such a sunspot signals the beginning of a period of higher solar activity, and NASA scientists had predicted in 2005 that the 2008-2011 solar max would be one of the most intense on record. The lack of activity since December (or, more accurately, January) has the Unknown Country team worried that the sun may really be entering a quieter, longer-term cycle. (Image shows the sun on 19th February 2008 — devoid of any sunspots.)

 A Painting By Hendrick Avercamp Depicting Life During The Little Ice AgeThe last time the sun went into “hibernation” began in approximately 1250, and lasted, with cyclic changes, into the mid 18th century — a period we now call “The Little Ice Age”.

At present, it continues, the gas profile of the atmosphere is similar to that which appears at the end of interglacials, and it is possible that, if another period of reduced solar output is in the offing, a new ice age could begin, following a pattern similar to that predicted in the book [The Coming Global] Superstorm. In the past, increased solar output has led to the retreat of glaciers, exposing millions of square miles of previously frozen soils to thawing, with the result that massive quantities of methane have entered the atmosphere, resulting in even higher temperatures and, in the end, the appearance of another interglacial period of relatively warm weather. During this period, greenhouse gasses have at first declined, then risen again as continued increases in solar output have resulted in high arctic heating.

Then, when solar output suddenly drops again, a period of extremely violent weather has followed, culminating in a winter of very extensive snowfall over the northern hemisphere, followed by a summer where the combination of the increased reflectivity of the snowpack and reduced solar output causes the snow to fail to melt, with the result that the next winter brings more snow, and another ice age commences.

There’s my worry in a nutshell — in just a single year, the earth could be set on a path leading to an extended period of freezing temperatures lasting centuries.

Whether or not climate change is human-induced, or human-assisted, may, in the end, turn out to be a moot point. There are bigger influences playing their part — and you can’t get much bigger than the sun. There’s a lot more research being conducted into what’s happening to our solar life-giver, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

I agree with the Unknown Country team when they write that at present, the question of what the sun will do over the next few years is of overwhelming importance in understanding how humanity might most usefully minimize the effects of what appears to be a period of sudden climate change that is rapidly gaining momentum.

Active Sun, 12 September 2005Contrasting Unknown Country’s concerns about a quiet Solar Cycle, SpaceWeather.com comments that many forecasters believe Solar Cycle 24 will be big and intense. Peaking in 2011 or 2012, (coinciding, perhaps with the end of the Mayan calendar?) the cycle to come could have significant impacts on telecommunications, air traffic, power grids and GPS systems. In this age of satellites and cell phones, the next solar cycle could make itself felt as never before. The furious storms won’t start right away, however. Solar cycles usually take a few years to build to a frenzy and Cycle 24 will be no exception.

“We still have some quiet times ahead,” says David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center, reassuringly.

Phew. That’s good news, at least. If it can be believed.

 

Read my Climate Change posts in chronological order by using the Climate Change Log.