Methane menace from Siberia threatens global climate

Ian Maxwell
Sunday, 10 September 2006 10:06

IT Industry - Market

While scientists try to come to grips with new evidence from 800,000 years-old Antartica ice cores that shows atmospheric carbon dioxide at unprecedented levels, a potentially deadlier climate change menace has emerged from methane released by melting permafrost from Siberia.

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A study published last week by the scientific journal Nature has detailed a study that shows methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, is being released into the atmosphere at a rate five time faster than previously thought.

The source of the methane is melting permafrost in Siberia, which is thawing due to global warming already in process due to increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels and other sources.

A problem for concerned scientists is that the issue of global warming is no longer a question of just cutting down on the burning of fossil fuels to decrease carbon dioxide levels.

Scientists are worried that the thawing Siberian permafrost, called yedoma, and the resulting bubbles of methane and carbon dioxide gas being released into the atmosphere is causing a greenhouse feedback cycle, which will result in further global warming.

The amount of carbon trapped in yedoma which could be released as both methane and carbon dioxide has been estimated in earlier study to be as much as 100 times the quantity of carbon dioxide released each year by fossil fuel burning.

What worries scientists the most is that if a feedback global warming process is indeed in process, with increasing quantities of greenhouses gases leading to increased warming and further permafrost thawing, there is no known way to stop it.