The powerful greenhouse gas, methane, is being released at high rates in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of eastern Siberia. International scientists aboard the Russian research vessel R/V Akademik Keldysh in the Laptev Sea [photo credit: Marcus Rex], found high levels of methane in the water column down to a depth of 350 meters. A Swedish scientist on board told the UK Guardian, “At this moment, there is unlikely to be any major impact on global warming, but the point is that this process has now been triggered. This East Siberian slope methane hydrate system has been perturbed and the process will be ongoing.” The US Geological Survey listed destabilization of Arctic hydrates as one of the four most serious scenarios for catastrophic climate change.
Methane gas traps heat at a rate 80 times that of carbon dioxide over a twenty year period. Science estimates that 1400 gigatons of hydrates including methane are locked in submarine Arctic permafrost. Higher sea temperatures caused by incursion of warm Atlantic seawater will cause subsurface hydrates to be released to the atmosphere. Scientists involved in the research caution that their study results are preliminary and not yet published. The scale of the detected releases are not yet determined until their data is analyzed. At one location, they found methane concentrations at a level 400 times higher than an equilibrium condition.
The chief scientist, Igor Semiletov, of the Russian Academy, said the findings are significantly larger than those determined before this research. "Potentially they can have serious climate consequences, but we need more study before we can confirm that.”, Semiletov said. It is the latest sign of warming in the Arctic where freeze up has yet to start, a date later than any other on record. This year's Siberian heat-wave saw temperatures 5C higher than average from January to June. Massive wildfires occurred throughout the region, melting permafrost and releasing carbon into the atmosphere in a vicious planet warming feedback loop. Craters and sinkholes pockmark previous stable ground in the tundra region. These are also occurring on the shallow seabed of the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea where methane bubbles are reaching the surface.