Woodstock Earth Blog

GLOBAL WARMING ON STEROIDS

Methane Gas Plumes in Arctic

Image courtesy The Independent, UK

When my neighbor tells me how much he's enjoying the beautiful warm weather, I don't know quite how to respond. Sometimes I'm polite and just smile, but I feel like asking how much he'll like it when the icebergs melt and his house is threatened, or when it goes up to 120 degrees in the summertime.

It may be just an anomaly, but our weather this winter has been crazy warm. 50 degrees in Times Square on New Years Eve. The 70's all week in upstate New York in mid March. Crocuses pushing up in mid February in upstate PA. No or barely any snow melt this spring coast to coast. The ramifications of all this on wildlife and our water supply could be far reaching. We all could go on and on with examples of how strange the weather's been.

We've all heard about "Global Warming", which though no Republican would dare utter the word (some of them however do admit now to "Climate Change"). The ambient temperatures only have to go up a few degrees to cause catastrophic results.

Well, one possible scientific explanation of why the warming may be accelerating beyond all the projections is methane gas absolutely gushing out of the melted permafrost in the arctic region.

Millions of tons of methane gas have been trapped for many thousands of years under the ocean by permafrost. The ambient temperatures in the Arctic ocean have gone up to a point where the permafrost has melted, or is melting, opening up the barriers to releasing vast quantities of methane gas directly into the atmosphere. This gas is literally bubbling up from the ocean floor in bubble plumes as large as a half mile in diameter. And there are possibly hundreds of these plumes.

The problem is that methane gas is roughly 20 times worse than carbon dioxide when it comes to greenhouse gasses and their effect on global warming. This could throw all the projections of global warming from carbon dioxide through the roof. Instead of a twenty or thirty year time frame, it could be incredibly shorter.

(We have also read that methane gas trapped below the melting permafrost in the vast arctic tundra is escaping directly from the ground into the atmosphere in larger and larger quantities.)

Please read this attached article from the Independent, a UK based periodical, about Russian scientists finding methane gas plumes on the ocean floor, and do your own research. Draw your own conclusions, but this may be one of the most important news stories of this century! Aside from a report on Yahoo News, and possibly a few others, so far we have seen virtually nothing on this story in the US press. 

We are looking forward to seeing your comments!