Trapped Methane in the Arctic Threatens our Atmosphere

The Giant Methane Monster Is Lurking; Release May Occur as the Ice Melts

From an Article by Thom Hartmann, EcoWtch.com, July 7, 2014

There’s something lurking deep under the frozen Arctic Ocean, and if it gets released, it could spell disaster for our planet.

That something is methane. (Methane is a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide. Natural gas is mostly methane, a fossil fuel containing carbon and hydrogen.)

We have a chance right now to keep the giant methane monster that’s lurking under the Arctic Ocean right where it is, and save our planet in the process.

Methane is one of the strongest of the natural greenhouse gases, about 80 times more potent than CO2, and while it may not get as much attention as its cousin CO2, it certainly can do as much, if not more, damage to our planet.

That’s because methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and there are trillions of tons of it embedded in a kind of ice slurry called methane hydrate or methane clathrate crystals in the Arctic and in the seas around the continental shelves all around the world.

If enough of this methane is released quickly enough, it won’t just produce the same old global warming. It could produce an extinction of species on a wide scale, an extinction that could even include the human race.

If there is a “ticking time bomb” on our planet that could lead to a global warming so rapid and sudden that we would have no way of dealing with it, it’s methane. Right now, estimates suggest that there’s more than 1,000 gigatons—that’s a thousand billion tons—of carbon in methane form trapped just under the Arctic ice. And if stays trapped under the ice, we might have a chance.

But, thanks to the global warming that’s already occurring, Arctic sea ice is melting at unprecedented rates. In fact, as Gaius Publius points out over at America Blog, just about every reputable projection on the loss of Arctic sea ice has been wrong in a very, very bad way.

The lack of sea ice cover in the Arctic that we’re seeing today wasn’t supposed to happen for 20+ more years according to 13 of the most accurate models. As all that sea ice melts, the Arctic ice which once reflected sunlight and prevented global warming, becomes a very blue ocean that absorbs heat and causes even more melting.

And this all means that more and more methane is being released into the atmosphere much faster than expected, speeding up the process of global warming and climate change. It’s all one big and vicious cycle, called a “positive feedback loop,” something that can spiral out of balance and control very quickly.

But here’s where it gets really scary.  See Part 2.