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The Methane Thread pt. 2

Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby onlooker » Mon 15 Jan 2018, 17:10:39

Once again highlighting this Nightmare eventuality of anoxic conditions triggering CH4 and H2S production

In the past 50 years, the amount of water in the open ocean with zero oxygen has gone up more than fourfold.


https://serc.si.edu/media/press-release ... obal-scope
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holy S....methane madness....

Unread postby Whitefang » Mon 22 Jan 2018, 17:35:18

https://robertscribbler.com/2013/12/18/ ... 150-years/

Diss and Onlooker, chips, it really looks very very grim for the oceans, shallow waters, (subsea) permafrost on both poles and even way up above our precious atmosphere.
Grim as well for land based creatures, complex life as we know it.

As noted above, Ward’s work focused on causes and what he found at numerous dig sites around the world was evidence of a ‘Great Dying’ that began at the ocean floor, proceeded upward from the depths, and eventually came to transcend the ocean boundary and inflict a similar, if less pronounced, lethality upon terrestrial organisms. The mechanism Ward proposed for the worst extinction in Earth’s geological memory involved how oceans and, in particular, living creatures in the oceans, respond to rapid warming. Ward found that during periods of high heat called hothouse states, oceans first became anoxic and stratified and then, during the worst events, transitioned to a deadly primordial state called a Canfield Ocean.


https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/me ... atmosphere

This graphic shows how methane, a greenhouse gas, boosts the abundance of water at the top of Earth's atmosphere. This water freezes around "meteor smoke" to form icy noctilucent clouds, or NLCs.
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby dissident » Tue 23 Jan 2018, 17:44:40

It has to be drilled into the heads of the average media consumer that the ocean state is driven by bacteria and microscopic plankton. All the larger organisms are a side show, this includes fish. And the micro-biotic regulator has a near-surface, euphotic zone valve which humans are cranking in the wrong direction.

The education system has failed us. It is too dumbed down and too contrived to please PC dogma and parents who think that their retarded child is smarter than Einstein. Even the university level does not prepare you to know vital information for understanding life-and-death processes relevant to all humans. Of course, the MSM is an epic fail too since it is too busy pretending there is a 50/50 opinion split on climate change and basically having zero reporters qualified to present relevant evidence (e.g. ocean biochemistry changes).
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby dohboi » Wed 24 Jan 2018, 17:31:12

It looks like future methane emissions from shallow lakes in agricultural areas have likely been underestimated due to the synergy between nutrients (from the agriculture) and future warming:

Title: "Combined nutrients and warming massively increase methane emissions from lakes"

https://phys.org/news/2018-01-combined- ... sions.html

Extract: "Shallow lakes in agricultural landscapes will emit significantly greater amounts of methane, mostly in the form of bubbles (ebullition) in a warmer world, which is a potential positive feedback mechanism to climate warming.

The present study used the longest-running freshwater mesocosm climate change experiment in the world to investigate how warming and eutrophication might interact to change methane ebullition in the future.
The results here were striking as they showed that the combination of increased nutrient loading and warming had a synergistic effect on the ebullition of methane. In the absence of nutrient enrichment, warming alone increased annual methane ebullition by around 50 percent and its relative contribution to total methane emission rose from about 50 percent to 75 percent.
In stark contrast, when nutrient levels were high, warming increased total methane emission by at least six-fold, and in some cases, 17-fold, and the proportion of ebullition increased to 95 percent of total annual methane flux."

See also:

Thomas A. Davidson et al, Synergy between nutrients and warming enhances methane ebullition from experimental lakes, Nature Climate Change (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-017-0063-z

(Thanks as often to aslr at arctic sea ice forum)
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby dissident » Wed 24 Jan 2018, 22:45:52

The marine emissions of CH4 will also go up in addition to lakes. Nutrient loading accelerates oxygen depletion, but the oxygen depletion will happen regardless just due to warming.

If the current global annual emissions of CH4 are 600 million tons, then several billion tons per year at the very least will be the new norm. We can stop worrying about CO2 doubling. CH4 concentrations going up over 10-fold will do us in quite nicely.
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby Tanada » Tue 06 Feb 2018, 08:50:12


November 2017: 1860.1 ppb
November 2016: 1851.2 ppb
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby M_B_S » Tue 06 Feb 2018, 16:45:03

Tanada wrote:
November 2017: 1860.1 ppb
November 2016: 1851.2 ppb

8O

+0,5%!
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby onlooker » Thu 15 Feb 2018, 22:20:24

https://m.phys.org/news/2017-04-early-o ... imate.html

However, scientists report a sudden surge in global methane emissions in the last three years, 2014-16.
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby dissident » Fri 16 Feb 2018, 01:04:49

onlooker wrote:https://m.phys.org/news/2017-04-early-out-of-control-climate.html

However, scientists report a sudden surge in global methane emissions in the last three years, 2014-16.


As posted in another thread by dohboi, we had warming triggered clathrate release in the past. But this required substantial warming (much more than 2 C). We are seeing something new this time around. Thanks to the rate of warming, the ocean anoxia induced CH4 (and H2S) production will increase faster. Eventually, the clathrates will be destabilized as well. But the issue is that we have much less time than if we only focus on the clathrates.
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Fri 16 Feb 2018, 11:49:02

d - Yes, a 2C warming will probably have little effect on the release of methane from the clathrates. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate

"Methane clathrates in continental rocks are trapped in beds of sandstone or siltstone at depths of less than 800 m. Sampling indicates they are formed from a mix of thermally and microbially derived gas from which the heavier hydrocarbons were later selectively removed. These occur in Alaska, Siberia, and Northern Canada. In 2008, Canadian and Japanese researchers extracted a constant stream of natural gas from a test project at the Mallik gas hydrate site in the Mackenzie River delta. This was the second such drilling at Mallik: the first took place in 2002 and used heat to release methane."

Note: needed to heat the clathrates to release the methane.

And obviously deep marine clathrates will be even less effected by a 2C increase in atmospheric temp increases.

I wonder if the recent "surge" in atmospheric methane is more a result of increased monitoring efforts then an actual increase. Another topic often ignored is the documentation of significant methane leaks from local residential and business distribution. I recall a test in NYC (?) when recorders run down city streets found measurable leaks every mile or two. Occasionally leaks are so large that buildings have been known to explode. This is a subject utility companies and city govts rather not advertise.
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby Plantagenet » Fri 16 Feb 2018, 14:06:48

ROCKMAN wrote:d - Yes, a 2C warming will probably have little effect on the release of methane from the clathrates. ....
"Methane clathrates in continental rocks are trapped in beds of sandstone or siltstone at depths of less than 800 m. .....And obviously deep marine clathrates will be even less effected by a 2C increase in atmospheric temp increases.


The current concern focusses not on clathrates in continental rocks or in deep marine sediments, but on shallow clathrates trapped in surface permafrost at high latitudes, both on land and on the shallow marine shelves.

And the amount of global warming in the Arctic will be far far greater then 2°C. For instance, temperatures this winter winter ran ca. 5-7°C above long term averages in Alaska and other parts of the Arctic for much of the early part of the winter.

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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby Cid_Yama » Fri 16 Feb 2018, 20:50:17

Clathrates/Hydrates discussions are a red herring. There is enough free methane in the sediments of the ESAS, under pressure, just looking for a pathway to release, to cause global catastrophic climate change.

Subsea permafrost on East Siberian Arctic Shelf in accelerated decline
Dr. Shakhova: As we showed in our articles, in the ESAS, in some places, subsea permafrost is reaching the thaw point. In other areas it could have reached this point already. And what can happen then? The most important consequence could be in terms of growing methane emissions… a linear trend becomes exponential.

This edge between it being linear and becoming exponential is very fine and lays between frozen and thawed states of subsea permafrost. This is what we call the turning point. To me, I cannot take the responsibility in saying there is a right point between the linear and exponential yet, but following the logic of our investigation and all the evidence that we accumulated so far, it makes me think that we are very near this point. And in this particular point, each year matters.

Gas in the areas of hotspots is releasing from the seabed deposits, in which free gas has accumulated for hundreds of thousands, or even for a million years. This is why the amount of this gas and its power in releasing (due to its high pressure) is tremendous.

Dr. Shakhova: The importance of hydrates involvement in methane emissions is overestimated. The hydrate is just one form of possible reservoirs, in which pre-formed methane could be preserved in the seabed if there are proper pressure/temperature conditions; it is just the layer of hydrates composes just few hundred of meters – this is a very small fraction compared to thousands of meters of underlying gas-charged sediments in the ESAS.

Dr. Semiletov added that the 5 billion tonnes of methane that is currently in the Earth’s atmosphere represents about one percent of the frozen methane hydrate store in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. He finishes emphasising “…but we believe the hydrate pool is only a tiny fraction of the total.”

Dr. Shakhova: The second point is that the hydrates are not all of the gaseous pool that is preserved in this huge reservoir. This huge area is 2 million square kilometres. The depth of this sedimentary drape is a few kilometres, up to 20 kilometres at places. Generally speaking, it makes no difference if gas releases from decaying hydrates or from other free-gas deposits, because in the latter, gas also has accumulated for a long time without changing the volume of the reservoir; for that reason, gas became over pressurised too.

Unlike hydrates, this gas is preserved free; it is a pre-formed gas, ready to go. Over pressured, accumulated, looking for the pathway to go upwards.

In our observations, we have accumulated the evidence that this gas front is propagating in the sediments. To me as a scientist, these points are enough to be convinced that methane release in the ESAS is related to disintegration of subsea permafrost and associated destabilisation of seabed deposits whether it is hydrates or free gas accumulations.

There is no mechanism to stop permafrost disintegration in the ESAS besides shelf exposure above the sea level that would serve to freeze the gas migration paths so that they integrate with the permafrost. Before that, the amount of methane that is releasing will increase while the supply lasts.

As gas within the sedimentary basins of the ESAS have been accumulating for a million years with no way to be released earlier, the supply for currently occurring emissions is tremendous. Because the shelf area is very shallow (mean depth is less than 50 metres), a fraction of these emissions will reach the atmosphere. The problem is that this fraction would be enough to alter the climate on our planet drastically.

link


The area of hotspots of methane are spreading, now encompassing a full 10% of the 2 million sq km of the ESAS. Which is 200,000 sq km.

Not only is the area of release spreading, the rate and volume of release is increasing, and they expect it to increase exponentially 3-5 orders of magnitude.

There is no way to shut this off, short of sea level dropping and exposing the shelves to temperatures capable of refreezing the permafrost. We know that isn't going to happen.

The methane will continue to release until there is no more to release, and that just 1% of the available methane will be enough to cause catastrophic climate change.

The interview with Semiletov and Shakhova was published 24 June 2017. their paper, Current rates and mechanisms of subsea permafrost degradation in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, was published 22 June 2017.
Last edited by Cid_Yama on Fri 16 Feb 2018, 20:59:55, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby chilyb » Sat 17 Feb 2018, 13:49:51

ROCKMAN, I would be interested in hearing your comments on the Semiletov and Shakhova paper!
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby onlooker » Sat 17 Feb 2018, 14:00:28

Actually, I would be interested in knowing Dissident's opinion on the Semiletov and Shakhova paper! And the conclusions Cid Yama reaches from it
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby Sys1 » Sat 17 Feb 2018, 16:21:05

We are obviously doomed as a civilisation and perhabs also as a specie.
The irony is that if we suddenly decide to stop polluting Earth atmosphere, global dimming will fade out rapidly and temperatures will skyrocket -without any methane involved- to something like +2°C.
Far more than necessary to destabilize methane from permafrost and oceans.
Add to that as soon as ice will totally disappear, the energy absorbed by the water when its state changes from solid to liquid will start to accumulate in the ocean. A bit like a glass of water with ice in summer. Water stays at 0°C during all the ice meling process then temperature increases fast.
There is also albedo effect, rainforest destruction, dirty carbon ressources, dying plancton... and peak oil on top of that.

The only question that matters now is how much time we have. Does anyone have got any solid information?
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby Cid_Yama » Sun 18 Feb 2018, 01:25:12

Shakhova's own words from the interview:

Dr. Shakhova: As we showed in our articles, in the ESAS, in some places, subsea permafrost is reaching the thaw point. In other areas it could have reached this point already. And what can happen then? The most important consequence could be in terms of growing methane emissions… a linear trend becomes exponential.

This edge between it being linear and becoming exponential is very fine and lays between frozen and thawed states of subsea permafrost. This is what we call the turning point. To me, I cannot take the responsibility in saying there is a right point between the linear and exponential yet, but following the logic of our investigation and all the evidence that we accumulated so far, it makes me think that we are very near this point. And in this particular point, each year matters.
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby Sys1 » Sun 18 Feb 2018, 05:21:21

Thanks Cid but she does not mention the point where Earth becomes hostile to humans beeing but the point where the trends shift from a linear growth to an exponential one. From there, do we have 10 years, more or less? Guy McPherson pretends we have 10 years, I personnaly -even as an extreme doomer- don't imagine our industrial civilisation to disappear so easily and so fast.
I'm certain that everything will fall apart before 2050, but as I'll be 75 years old in 2050, I prefer not to worry about something quite far from my life perspective ;). Yeah, I'm selfish.
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby dissident » Sun 18 Feb 2018, 09:01:57

onlooker wrote:Actually, I would be interested in knowing Dissident's opinion on the Semiletov and Shakhova paper! And the conclusions Cid Yama reaches from it


We had a big confrontation in this forum several years ago over the Semiletov and Shakhova work. They were predicting massive outgassing of CH4 in the ESAS based on simplistic extrapolation of the peak measured values for CH4 release that they observed in ship cruise data that covered only a tiny fraction of the ESAS. People in the threads took these predictions as already happening and started to look for ways to explain away why observed CH4 values were not jumping.

Here are the key details, so that more hysterical BS does not start up again:

1) The predicted emissions increase over the ESAS must be accompanied by massive increases in measured CH4 concentrations in the Arctic. The current (increasing) global emissions of 600+ megatons/year would increase to over 3 gigatons/year with the ESAS region becoming like CH4 volcano, i.e. the highest emissions on the planet by far.

2) We would see surface CH4 values around the ESAS easily hitting dozens of ppmv (not 1.8+/-20% but increases of 1000s of percent). It does not matter that CH4 is lighter than air, since there are mixing processes including diffusion and turbulence that will increase background concentrations. It will not be a case of gigantic bubbles of CH4 escaping into the stratosphere and "hiding there". In fact, mixing is what allows the CH4 to affect the global temperatures. If it was escaping into the stratosphere it would be only acting to cool the stratosphere (just as CO2 does by increasing the amount of IR escaping to space. The stratosphere is optically thin to IR and instead of surface heating it is ozone heating that maintains temperatures. The shortwave solar radiation captured by ozone is converted into black body radiation by thermalization or collision of molecules. Increasing concentrations of IR absorbers like CO2 and CH4 increases the cooling rate.) In addition, sending the CH4 to the stratosphere would shorten its lifetime to a small fraction of the 10 years it is observed to have. Since it is in the stratosphere where CH4 is destroyed by photochemistry pathways not available in the troposphere. In the troposphere, CH4 is destroyed by OH. In the stratosphere you have hard UV photolysis and attack by atomic oxygen.

Anyway, these two researchers were being too sensationalist and their predictions have not panned out. Obviously, eventually the ESAS dissociated CH4 will escape. But there are serious questions. How much of it there is, since Arctic Seabed outgassing occurs regularly and has been doing so for thousands of years. This requires an expensive seabed drilling campaign to characterize the resource. But we are talking about scientific research projects which are not funded like oil exploration.
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby Cid_Yama » Sun 18 Feb 2018, 09:36:42

How Abrupt is Abrupt?

Dr. Jim White at 2014 AGU
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Re: The Methane Thread pt. 2

Unread postby Cid_Yama » Sun 18 Feb 2018, 10:48:27

Nice try Dissident, You were wrong then and are wrong now. No one said that an abrupt release of massive amounts of methane was occurring then. S&S said that a 50 GT release could occur at any time. Semiletov and Shakhova's paper back then was supported by the NSF. https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116532

Your response, of course, was to claim methane levels were not rising in the Arctic and to try to discredit the very people who are actually doing the research. I see that has not changed.

In the 8 years since then, the research data has grown immensely. Profound changes across the Arctic have been documented. And Methane levels have increased dramatically.

From 2016:
Sky Rocketing Arctic Methane Levels Help Tell Part of the Much Bigger Story of Major Change


From 2016:
Arctic methane gas emission 'significantly increased since 2014' - major new research
New expedition in Laptev Sea suggests increase in the rate of underwater permafrost degradation.

'The area of spread of methane mega-emissions has significantly increased in comparison with the data obtained in the period from 2011 to 2014,' Semiletov said. 'These observations may indicate that the rate of degradation of underwater permafrost has increased.'

Five years ago Semiletov reported:

'We found more than 100 fountains, some more than a kilometre across....These are methane fields on a scale not seen before. The emissions went directly into the atmosphere... Earlier we found torch or fountain-like structures like this...

This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing. Over a relatively small area, we found more than 100, but over a wider area, there should be thousands of them.'

'We have reason to believe that such emissions may change the climate. This is due to the fact that the reserves of methane under the submarine permafrost exceed the methane content in the atmosphere is many thousands of times.

'If 3-4% from underwater go into the atmosphere within 10 years, the methane concentration therein (in the atmosphere) will increase by tens to hundreds of times, and this can lead to rapid climate warming."

The new expedition was organised by the Laboratory of Arctic Research in Pacific Oceanology Institute of the Far Eastern Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU), the Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences, and was funded by the Russian Government and the Russian Science Foundation.

link

Methane Archive

Increased levels of methane have been measured in the stratosphere. Methane in the stratosphere leaves behind water vapor which forms polar stratospheric clouds that act like a blanket.

And in the last few years we have seen exactly what we would expect, PSCs spreading southward and the first ever Arctic ozone hole.

Evidence of Hydroxl depletion has also been found. Which would extend the half-life of methane in the atmosphere.

link

link
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