Permafrost Methane Time Bomb

I understand the situation this way.

All organic carbon in permafrost soils is the product of previous photosynthesis. If that material is decomposed under anaerobic conditions, it becomes methane; if conditions are aerobic it goes to CO2 instead.

Both of those gases may be promptly released to the atmosphere. In the case of methane, if the source is sufficiently deep and other conditions exist, the methane could form ice clathrates and not be released to atmosphere promptly.

As these soils warm, they may also dry out. I suppose this can allow the clathrates to release methane, but the ongoing microbial production of additional methane would slow down.

So far, the terrestrial release of methane has not increased - or at least I am not aware that it has been shown to increase a lot. But there is no doubt at all that a lot of organic C is stored in these soils.

The pathways leading to methane release are reasonably well understood. The future climates of the permafrost areas cannot be known accurately, but the range of predictions include some bad ones.

Another thing that is already happening in high-latitude systems is the northward spread of shrubs and trees. This is one of the clear indicators that climate is changing now. It also means that more organic C will be transferred to those soils. What happens to that C afterwards, well we are going to find out later. Especially if C-cycle research continues to be funded at such sites. (I always have to pitch that).

This topic is linked in my mind with Canada's decision to exit global climate agreements. That country has a lot of C-rich permafrost.

Globally, other soil processes consume methane from the atmosphere (converting it to CO2). This looks like a small flux, but it is one we do not understand well. It is another instance where we might get lucky.

The Yellowstone caldera was mentioned above, and that is interesting because young volcanic ash soils seem to be very good at hosting the microbes that consume methane. Large volcanic eruptiosn have many different effects on climate, at different scales of time and space. Interesting stuff.

 

The carbon was trapped 20-30 thousand years ago during the last ice age.How it was warm enough to grow plants is an interesting mystery.
Now in an interglacial the permafrost melts and releases methane or CO2.
Guess what happens next?
Plants grow and there is a carbon sink, same as what happened 30,000 years ago.Except now they grow faster due to increased CO2.
Cant to wait hear what insulting provocation that Sagebrush has to add.

 

BTW permafrost has been melting for the past 12,000 years since the last ice age ended.Except before it was in Idaho and Canada ,now its in Alaska.
Weve been doomed for a long long time.

 

Canada's decision was quite an easy one. Without China, India, or the united states approving the treaty, Canada would not really be doing anyone any good if it paid its fine for emitting more than kyoto. It would be a stiff fine, but costs would be smaller than if Canada lived up to its promises and reduced ghg. A strange related tempest is now happening in congress with the attempt to tie the payroll tax cut to the keystone pipeline. Now without canada having to follow kyoto, if the oil is not refined in the united states they won't be penalized by refining it themselves then sell the US the gasoline, heating oil, and diesel instead of the syn oil. If the methane is all released quickly, this is a bit of a side show, but IMHO it will be released slowly, and oil consumption from the oil sands will be properly be the main event.

But I definitely agree that the countries affected, Canada, the US, Russia, and Denmark should continue to study the situation and figure out how fast it is occurring and ways to reduce the ghg level.

 

It is no mystery that plant growth exists in permafrost regions,, it is merely that you don't understand permafrost. As I have suggested to those in the denial community, they ought to actually visit high latitudes to see what the landscape is actually like.

As Cyclo suggests, it is not a"frozen block" but rather an active ecosystem that happens to freeze annually on the surface, which allows a short growing season on the surface, but it "never" melts completly deeper down. As such, the biomass does not regularly decompose at the same rate it would in temperate climes,,in effect sequestering the biomass in ,,permafrost.

Icarus

 

Long but informative:

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/...ork-times-print-edition-gets-the-story-right/

The good news: The best NOAA analysis “suggests we have not yet activated strong climate feedbacks from permafrost and CH4 hydrates.†Climate Progress first reported that finding 2 years ago. The lead author of that work confirms to CP it still remains true — despite the fact that methane levels have been rising for the past 5 years after a decade of little growth.

The bad news: Leading experts at NOAA, the National Snow and Ice Data Center and around the world now expect the permafrost to become a major source of atmospheric carbon in the next few decades (see “NSIDC/NOAA: Thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100″ and “Nature: Climate Experts Warn Thawing Permafrost Could Cause 2.5 Times the Warming of Deforestation!“)

 

"One day in 2007, on the plain in northern Alaska, a lightning strike set the tundra on fire.

Historically, tundra, a landscape of lichens, mosses and delicate plants, was too damp to burn. But the climate in the area is warming and drying, and fires in both the tundra and forest regions of Alaska are increasing.

The Anaktuvuk River fire burned about 400 square miles of tundra, and work on lake sediments showed that no fire of that scale had occurred in the region in at least 5,000 years.

Scientists have calculated that the fire and its aftermath sent a huge pulse of carbon into the air — as much as would be emitted in two years by a city the size of Miami. Scientists say the fire thawed the upper layer of permafrost and set off what they fear will be permanent shifts in the landscape..."

 

"But scientists who track methane in the atmosphere in the Arctic and elsewhere around the planet see no big surge that can be pinned on such releases. Before I distributed the link to the new paper above to relevant scientists, I’d already heard from Ed Dlugokencky, one of the top federal researchers tracking methane trends. He sent a detailed review of atmospheric measurements from the Arctic to the Equator and concluded, quite simply:
“ased on what we see in the atmosphere, there is no evidence of substantial increases in methane emissions from the Arctic in the past 20 years.”"


"So despite a warming Arctic, the feared large methane release has not been manifest. Which fits very nicely into the new results from Dmitrenko and colleagues. They find that the methane observed to be bubbling up from the Arctic seafloor off the coast of Siberia to be the ongoing and long-term response to the flooding of the seabed there that occurred some 8,000 years ago and not a response to recent warming in the region. Dmitrenko et al. write:

The CH4 [methane] supersaturation, recently reported from the eastern Siberian shelf, is believed to be the result of the degradation of subsea permafrost that is due to the long-lasting warming initiated by permafrost submergence about 8000 years ago rather than from those triggered by recent Arctic climate changes."

References:
Dlugokencky, E. J., et al., 2009. Observational constraints on recent increases in the atmospheric CH4 burden. Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L18803, doi:10.1029/2009GL039780.
<P>
Dmitrenko, I.A., et al., 2011. Recent changes in the shelf hydrography in the Siberian Arctic: Potential for subsea permafrost instability. Journal of Geophysical Research, 116, C10027, doi:10.1029/2001JC007218.

World Climate Report »

​

 

If you look here

ESRL Global Monitoring Division - Data Visualization..

and change the parameter to methane, you will see the most recent two (orange = preliminary) data. Naturally we are obliged to hope that they do not indicate a step change in the atmospheric methane cycle.

If they do, 2012 promises to be a very interesting year...

 

Hope, yes, but consider the possibilities and their chances of happening.

What would reduce the release of methane? How likely is that to occur?

What would increase the release of methane, and how likely is that to happen?

Given the scenario and what we know of methane's properties, I don't see a probable mechanism for the temperature doing anything but rising.

 

Whether humans can do anything to slow down or prevent reaching the tipping point, is there any dispute that if we get to that point there will be no return?

 

If this is (real and) from the sediments on Arctic ocean continental shelves, it would seem to be not at all convenient for human action to reduce it. More oil extraction could perhaps increase it, but what the heck could we do to reduce fluxes over large marine areas?

It may be happening because of changes in physical state of the Arctic ocean. Temperature and sea-ice patterns. Or, it may result from changes in sediment fluxes carried by the Arctic rivers. There have been some recent studies documenting flux transport increases in some of those rivers.

This could direct us to a large, hypothetical, and probably unrealistic response. Of catching such sediment on a large scale. But might it not just continue to evade methane, even after trapping on land?

No I don't really see human ways to reduce the methane flux, as described above. We can only hope that the processes involved have low temperature sensitivity and low disturbance sensitivity.

Or as I wrote earlier, we can hope that the last two provisional data points are just zingers of some sort.

You can wish that we fully understood the processes, or with that we could affect the outcomes, hyo. But I just don't see it that way. We are in ballistic flight.

 

There is some disagreement that tipping points exist, or that human activity can cause the earth system to pass them. The concept has been referred to in these pages as 'tripping points' by one of our members (channeling Rush Limbaugh I guess).

All of that is rightly filed in my 'hope' section I think. It does require come complicated thinking how glacial ages begin and end; both of them appear to be tipping point in the earth system. OK then, Tipping points exist but humans are too minor in their effects to get past them. That also belongs in the hope chest.

 

I think we already have affected the outcomes.

We've known for some time that methane is released into the atmosphere when permafrost melts. Perhaps people fail to comprehend the implications, and/or the vast volumes of permafrost, but CO2 as a trigger for methane should have been obvious.

 

If there's no tipping point, or no way to prevent us reaching it, or no way to reverse the process once we reach it, then why worry?