An international team of scientists, part of a multi-year International Shelf Study Expedition – has released preliminary findings that indicate frozen methane deposits have begun leaking methane over a large area of around 1,500 square kilometers (578 square miles) of the Laptev Sea on the continental slope off the East Siberian coast.
The Guardian is reporting that the scale of the methane releases will not be confirmed until they return, and they analyze the data and have their studies published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas with a global warming potential of 80. This means that a molecule of methane can lead to 80 times more warming than a molecule of carbon dioxide. The frozen deposits have been around the Arctic for hundreds of thousands of years.
They are an accumulation of frozen biomass, according to the Weather Channel – hidden away deep underground and shielded from the atmosphere, where they have remained in a stable, frozen state – until recently.
However, with global warming causing Arctic temperatures to rise twice as fast as the rest of the world, it has become a question of when – or even whether – the methane will be released into the atmosphere.
Destabilization due to “Atlantification”
In 2017, Digital Journal reported on a study that claims the Arctic Ocean is undergoing Atlantification, or in other words, it is becoming more like the Atlantic Ocean, changing its chemistry and temperature.
Igor Polyakov, an oceanographer at the University of Alaska who led the study, says that new research shows that warm waters are flowing into the ocean north of Scandinavia and Russia, altering ocean productivity and chemistry, causing the sea ice to recede and “kickstarting” a feedback loop that will eventually make summer sea ice a thing of the past.
And as permafrost in the Arctic regions has been thawing due to the climate crisis, methane is being released. This latest study marks the third possible sighting of methane emissions in this particular region of the Eastern Arctic.
The 60-member team on the Akademik Keldysh believes they are the first to observationally confirm the methane release is already underway across a wide area of the slope about 600km offshore.
Igor Semiletov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who is the chief scientist on board, said the discharges were “significantly larger” than anything found before. “The discovery of actively releasing shelf-slope hydrates is very important and unknown until now,” he said. “This is a new page. Potentially they can have serious climate consequences, but we need more study before we can confirm that.”
This is also the second year in a row that the team has found crater-like pockmarks in the shallower parts of the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea. This finding is similar to the craters and sinkholes reported from the inland Siberian tundra earlier this fall.
Overall, from January to June of this year, temperatures in Siberia were 5 degrees Centigrade higher than average, an anomaly that was made at least 600 times more likely by human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and methane.
One last thing – Last year’s Arctic sea ice melt occurred unusually early, and this winter’s freeze has yet to occur – making this a late start before it has even begun.
