“..Arctic seabed stores of methane are now destabilizing and venting vast stores of frozen methane—a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
The paper, in the prestigious journal Science, reports the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf—long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane—
- is instead perforated and leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere.
Melting of even a fraction of the clathrates stored in that shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.
Lead author Natalia Shakhova Shakhova of the International Arctic Research Center tells U of Alaska Fairbanks:
“The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans.
Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.”
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area encompassing more than three-quarter million square miles of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean—
- three times larger than the nearby Siberian wetlands formerly considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane.
Shakhova’s research shows the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already emitting 7 teragrams (1 teragram = 1.1 million tons) of methane yearly ..
.. about as much as the all the oceans of the world..”
go to source/story>>Massive Methane Melt off Siberia | Mother Jones
