8 ms·

Photos Reveal More Than 200 Arctic Lakes Have Started Bubbling with Methane Gas

133 points by Keyframe 10y ago

EGreg 10y ago
I have a question Methane (CH4) is said to be 30-105x more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. But burning it produces energy and CO2 as a byproduct. So wouldn't it make sense to use it and burn it at these lakes instead of letting it escape? Even if you do not harness the energy.
- partycoder 10y ago
  The problem is doing it at the scale required. The East Siberian Arctic Shelf alone has an estimated amount of 50 to 800 gigatons of CH4. Current atmospheric concentration of CH4 is about 5. I think our best interest is to stop or slow down the process and try to find out a solution. And that is achieved by keeping the permafrost frozen. One solution could be using metanotrophs, which are unicellular organisms that eat methane. The advantage over reacting chemicals is that they reproduce on their own. Maybe we enhance them through GMO to make them have a higher fertility rate.
  - EGreg 10y ago
    But the fire would just spread and burn it all. Your idea is good too, they also engineered bacteria to eat plastic in the great pacific garbage patch.
    - macawfish 10y ago
      I dunno, methane isn't very energy dense. It's hard for me to imagine the fire spreading unless the methane was already in very dangerous concentrations. But I don't know! Seems worth investigating. Also, what would be the risk of something like that perturbing larger bubbles and causing an eruption, like a popping balloon?
    - partycoder 10y ago
      Problem is that fire would also increase temperature reinforcing the methane release.
  - api 10y ago
    It really is too bad we can't harvest and store it all. Hundreds of years of clean burning low carbon energy.
    - pm90 10y ago
      Well, maybe we can if we put some of our best thinkers on it instead of cutting funding for scientific research...
Red_Tarsius 10y ago
Summary points: > The lakes are a type of thermokarst lake, which form when thawing permafrost causes the surface to collapse and fill in with meltwater. These ones are bright blue and bubbling, because of methane that's leaking into them before escaping into the atmosphere. > Researchers announced that they're also monitoring around 7,000 gas bubbles or 'pingos', which have formed in Siberia and are at risk of exploding to form huge craters. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13941923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13941923 > Methane is roughly 30 times more potent than CO2 as a heat-trapping gas. > By 2100, up to 205 billion T of carbon emissions will be released by permafrost if climate change continues to intensify. > Previous research had suggested that a global temperature rise of 1.5°C (2.7°F) would be enough to start the melting of Siberia's permafrost, and scientists are concerned that these lakes and pingos are a sign it's already happening. > What's interesting is that the satellite data suggests the leaks are happening year-round in these regions, even at temperatures close to 0°C (32°F).
- ams6110 10y ago
  You left out: They aren't entirely sure what's causing them, but the hypothesis for now is that it could be related to seismic activity. "For example, over one of the gas deposits (in Yamal), lakes are located along two lines ... looking like a giant cross," Bogoyavlensky told the Siberian Times. This suggests "genetic connection of craters with deep faults in the Earth's crust, but to confirm we need to conduct thorough seismic research".
  - appleflaxen 10y ago
    The future in increasingly clear, and utterly terrifying. I hope you're right, but suspect the "but maybe not!" discussions about the local details in different areas are less important than finding solutions to the big picture that we do understand.
M_Grey 10y ago
If this somehow magically inspired people around the world to literally abandon modern life, you'd still be seeing the current trends coast for at least a couple of decades. Needless to say, far from anything like radical change, we're continuing full steam ahead.
AlexCoventry 10y ago
> high sulphur levels caused by the leaking methane. What does this mean?
- mirimir 10y ago
  Biogenic CH4 often contains H2S.
pastaking 10y ago
Can we harvest this methane gas and use it as an energy source?
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  That's what natural gas is. So, in theory, yes. The problem is that, as a gas, and as a gas that's emerging in an uncontrolled fashion across a large area which is poorly developed, far from infrastructure, and in many cases hostile to development. Most natural gas is harvested from the same types of formations as those which form oil-bearing rock: a reservoir covered by some trapping (nonpermiable) formation, which releases gas only when tapped by a drill pipe. That is, the point of emission is very much a point. The areas are also already being developed for oil, have access roads, labour, and infrastructure. As such, it's generally easier to capture and store the natural gas. And even then, for much of early oil extraction, natural gas was flared off, because it was too difficult to capture, store, and transport it. Excess oil could be (and was) stored in impromptu open lakes formed by bulldozed earth. Gas requires airtight containers, and is far easier to manage when pressurised (300 atmospheres) or liquified (-162C). Doing all of this in the Siberian tundra is a major challenge. Flaring off the excess would be far more viable, and even that is a challenge.
DougN7 10y ago
I'm not a survivalist, but it seems that at some point you just have to start preparing for the inevitable. So buy land and water rights inland??
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  How do you supposed you are going to survive without all the affordances of some kind of civilization. Do you imagine some kind of postman or waterworld type of thing? I'm pretty sure either we all make it or none of us do. There is no escaping the inevitability of mammalian biology. You need to keep your body at a certain temperature and it's looking more and more like that is going to be impossible in the new climate regime.
  - candiodari 10y ago
    Why the armageddon claims ? You realize humans have previously coped just fine with water levels meters higher than they are now I hope. So given that the worst IPCC predictions only predict about a 2m water level rise, and that so far the first 20 years of those predictions turned out to have been WAY overblown, I think we'll do just fine as a species, even long term. In fact, even if worst comes to worst, medieval water management techniques will in fact be able to prevent any coastline encroachment until well into the 2200s. At that point, I think we may put some thought into adapting, and I bet we'll be able to come up with something (or we could just move a few cities. That too has been done before. Okay, okay, more than "a few". And no, we won't run out of arable land, or water, or ... I mean it's unknown of course, but it's not out of the question that the planet actually becomes more hospitable to humans with higher temperatures. Certainly in a few regions that will be true, and maybe globally). TLDR: you will be perfectly fine, even under the worst of the worst predictions, and so will California beachfront property, or Manhattan, or ... at the very least for 4-5 generations.
    - gooserock 10y ago
      Rising sea levels are a concern in the long-term, but what I'm most worried about in my lifetime is the collapse of the industrial food system due to rapid warming. Basically if the Earth warms faster than plants and science can adapt, it's a real possibility that a very large chunk of the arable land that currently feeds eight billion people worldwide will become useless. The fear is that we won't be able to grow wheat or rice where we used to, due to heat and drought (Great Plains) or floods (Southeast Asia) or whatever else. Sure, we could just start farming Siberia and Northern Canada, but it would take decades to establish all the infrastructure necessary to do that, and in the meantime we'd have to deal with truly massive famines, political destabilization, and the collapse of many states. Not to mention the fact that crop yields will inevitably be lower in arctic latitudes due to shorter growing seasons. Our entire civilization is built on a global, industrial food network, and it's more precarious than you think. Most countries don't have reserves of food at all, and the ones that do only have scant reserves. If methane releases cause the Earth's climate to lurch warmer in a short enough period of time, a couple real good crop failures will cause the network to collapse, and our civilization (or at least a few entire regions) will collapse in short order.
macawfish 10y ago
I can just see it now... natural gas companies decide to frack the arctic, accidentally triggering hundreds of irreversible methane releases. Edit: okay I looked this up and of course it's already a thing. http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/energy-production/frozen-fuel4.htm http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/en...
- qeternity 10y ago
  > Edit: okay I looked this up and of course it's already a thing. As in the concept exists? It's most certainly not a practical or economic thing. You should look at how deep sea drilling economics were rattled due to fracking. O&G prices need to rally a hell of a lot to make this profitable.
  - macawfish 10y ago
    The interest exists. If it did become profitable, I wouldn't put it past them to go for it. I used to think that stuff like this was crazy, now I'm not so sure: http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/pies-in-the-sky-a-solution-to-global-warming/ http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/pies-in-the-sky-a-sol...
    - T-A 10y ago
      Once burned... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-10/big-oil-abandons-2-5-billion-in-u-s-arctic-drilling-rights https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-10/big-oil-a...
      - macawfish 10y ago
        May this be the beginning of the carbon bubble pop.
- subpixel 10y ago
  It's impossible to imagine a level of environmental degradation that would cause extraction companies to say "On second thought, let's leave that resource where it is." To wit: open-face mining the sea floor (http://www.seeker.com/worlds-first-deep-sea-mining-venture-set-to-launch-in-2019-2327856967.html http://www.seeker.com/worlds-first-deep-sea-mining-venture-s...) "The machines, each the size of a small house, are equipped with rock-crushing teeth resembling the large incisors of a dinosaur. The robots will lumber across the ocean floor on mammoth treads, grinding and chewing the encrusted seabed, sending plumes of sediment into the surrounding waters and killing marine life that gets in their way. The smallest of the robots weighs 200 tons. 'A lot of people don't realize that there are more mineral resources on the seafloor than on land," said Michael Johnston, CEO of Nautilus, by phone from the company's field office in Brisbane, Australia. "Technology has allowed us to go there.' ... Over two-dozen contracts have already been granted to explore hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean floor by a United Nations body called the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which regulates areas of the seafloor that lie outside of any national jurisdiction."
Pxtl 10y ago
Worth noting: a massive volcanic eruption of sulfur in Siberia ended almost all life on Earth once. It rained sulfuric acid with the pH of lemon juice worldwide and everything died, it took 10 million years for diversity to start building again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_...
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  I think it's going to be a much slower burn this time around. More like boiling a crab very, very slowly. We had a good run but in the end the dinosaurs had the last laugh.
  - AznHisoka 10y ago
    how do dinosaurs laugh?
    - tomrod 10y ago
      Nasally, if Jurassic Park 3 is to be believed.
    - appreneur 10y ago
      They survived for 300million years... We (modern humans) didn't even reach a 100,000 years of survival. Hence we are in the dinosaurs land.Earth belong to dinosaurs... Longest survived mamals.
      - sand500 10y ago
        Dinosaurs are reptiles.
- mtarnovan 10y ago
  That's just one of several theories explaining the cause of the extinction.
- agumonkey 10y ago

133 points by Keyframe 10y ago

EGreg 10y ago

I have a question Methane (CH4) is said to be 30-105x more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. But burning it produces energy and CO2 as a byproduct. So wouldn't it make sense to use it and burn it at these lakes instead of letting it escape? Even if you do not harness the energy.

partycoder 10y ago
The problem is doing it at the scale required. The East Siberian Arctic Shelf alone has an estimated amount of 50 to 800 gigatons of CH4. Current atmospheric concentration of CH4 is about 5. I think our best interest is to stop or slow down the process and try to find out a solution. And that is achieved by keeping the permafrost frozen. One solution could be using metanotrophs, which are unicellular organisms that eat methane. The advantage over reacting chemicals is that they reproduce on their own. Maybe we enhance them through GMO to make them have a higher fertility rate.
- EGreg 10y ago
  But the fire would just spread and burn it all. Your idea is good too, they also engineered bacteria to eat plastic in the great pacific garbage patch.
  - macawfish 10y ago
    I dunno, methane isn't very energy dense. It's hard for me to imagine the fire spreading unless the methane was already in very dangerous concentrations. But I don't know! Seems worth investigating. Also, what would be the risk of something like that perturbing larger bubbles and causing an eruption, like a popping balloon?
  - partycoder 10y ago
    Problem is that fire would also increase temperature reinforcing the methane release.
- api 10y ago
  It really is too bad we can't harvest and store it all. Hundreds of years of clean burning low carbon energy.
  - pm90 10y ago
    Well, maybe we can if we put some of our best thinkers on it instead of cutting funding for scientific research...

Red_Tarsius 10y ago

Summary points: > The lakes are a type of thermokarst lake, which form when thawing permafrost causes the surface to collapse and fill in with meltwater. These ones are bright blue and bubbling, because of methane that's leaking into them before escaping into the atmosphere. > Researchers announced that they're also monitoring around 7,000 gas bubbles or 'pingos', which have formed in Siberia and are at risk of exploding to form huge craters. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13941923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13941923 > Methane is roughly 30 times more potent than CO2 as a heat-trapping gas. > By 2100, up to 205 billion T of carbon emissions will be released by permafrost if climate change continues to intensify. > Previous research had suggested that a global temperature rise of 1.5°C (2.7°F) would be enough to start the melting of Siberia's permafrost, and scientists are concerned that these lakes and pingos are a sign it's already happening. > What's interesting is that the satellite data suggests the leaks are happening year-round in these regions, even at temperatures close to 0°C (32°F).

ams6110 10y ago
You left out: They aren't entirely sure what's causing them, but the hypothesis for now is that it could be related to seismic activity. "For example, over one of the gas deposits (in Yamal), lakes are located along two lines ... looking like a giant cross," Bogoyavlensky told the Siberian Times. This suggests "genetic connection of craters with deep faults in the Earth's crust, but to confirm we need to conduct thorough seismic research".
- appleflaxen 10y ago
  The future in increasingly clear, and utterly terrifying. I hope you're right, but suspect the "but maybe not!" discussions about the local details in different areas are less important than finding solutions to the big picture that we do understand.

M_Grey 10y ago

If this somehow magically inspired people around the world to literally abandon modern life, you'd still be seeing the current trends coast for at least a couple of decades. Needless to say, far from anything like radical change, we're continuing full steam ahead.

AlexCoventry 10y ago

> high sulphur levels caused by the leaking methane. What does this mean?

mirimir 10y ago
Biogenic CH4 often contains H2S.

pastaking 10y ago

Can we harvest this methane gas and use it as an energy source?

dredmorbius 10y ago
That's what natural gas is. So, in theory, yes. The problem is that, as a gas, and as a gas that's emerging in an uncontrolled fashion across a large area which is poorly developed, far from infrastructure, and in many cases hostile to development. Most natural gas is harvested from the same types of formations as those which form oil-bearing rock: a reservoir covered by some trapping (nonpermiable) formation, which releases gas only when tapped by a drill pipe. That is, the point of emission is very much a point. The areas are also already being developed for oil, have access roads, labour, and infrastructure. As such, it's generally easier to capture and store the natural gas. And even then, for much of early oil extraction, natural gas was flared off, because it was too difficult to capture, store, and transport it. Excess oil could be (and was) stored in impromptu open lakes formed by bulldozed earth. Gas requires airtight containers, and is far easier to manage when pressurised (300 atmospheres) or liquified (-162C). Doing all of this in the Siberian tundra is a major challenge. Flaring off the excess would be far more viable, and even that is a challenge.

DougN7 10y ago

I'm not a survivalist, but it seems that at some point you just have to start preparing for the inevitable. So buy land and water rights inland??

dkarapetyan 10y ago
How do you supposed you are going to survive without all the affordances of some kind of civilization. Do you imagine some kind of postman or waterworld type of thing? I'm pretty sure either we all make it or none of us do. There is no escaping the inevitability of mammalian biology. You need to keep your body at a certain temperature and it's looking more and more like that is going to be impossible in the new climate regime.
- candiodari 10y ago
  Why the armageddon claims ? You realize humans have previously coped just fine with water levels meters higher than they are now I hope. So given that the worst IPCC predictions only predict about a 2m water level rise, and that so far the first 20 years of those predictions turned out to have been WAY overblown, I think we'll do just fine as a species, even long term. In fact, even if worst comes to worst, medieval water management techniques will in fact be able to prevent any coastline encroachment until well into the 2200s. At that point, I think we may put some thought into adapting, and I bet we'll be able to come up with something (or we could just move a few cities. That too has been done before. Okay, okay, more than "a few". And no, we won't run out of arable land, or water, or ... I mean it's unknown of course, but it's not out of the question that the planet actually becomes more hospitable to humans with higher temperatures. Certainly in a few regions that will be true, and maybe globally). TLDR: you will be perfectly fine, even under the worst of the worst predictions, and so will California beachfront property, or Manhattan, or ... at the very least for 4-5 generations.
  - gooserock 10y ago
    Rising sea levels are a concern in the long-term, but what I'm most worried about in my lifetime is the collapse of the industrial food system due to rapid warming. Basically if the Earth warms faster than plants and science can adapt, it's a real possibility that a very large chunk of the arable land that currently feeds eight billion people worldwide will become useless. The fear is that we won't be able to grow wheat or rice where we used to, due to heat and drought (Great Plains) or floods (Southeast Asia) or whatever else. Sure, we could just start farming Siberia and Northern Canada, but it would take decades to establish all the infrastructure necessary to do that, and in the meantime we'd have to deal with truly massive famines, political destabilization, and the collapse of many states. Not to mention the fact that crop yields will inevitably be lower in arctic latitudes due to shorter growing seasons. Our entire civilization is built on a global, industrial food network, and it's more precarious than you think. Most countries don't have reserves of food at all, and the ones that do only have scant reserves. If methane releases cause the Earth's climate to lurch warmer in a short enough period of time, a couple real good crop failures will cause the network to collapse, and our civilization (or at least a few entire regions) will collapse in short order.

macawfish 10y ago

I can just see it now... natural gas companies decide to frack the arctic, accidentally triggering hundreds of irreversible methane releases. Edit: okay I looked this up and of course it's already a thing. http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/energy-production/frozen-fuel4.htm http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/en...

qeternity 10y ago
> Edit: okay I looked this up and of course it's already a thing. As in the concept exists? It's most certainly not a practical or economic thing. You should look at how deep sea drilling economics were rattled due to fracking. O&G prices need to rally a hell of a lot to make this profitable.
- macawfish 10y ago
  The interest exists. If it did become profitable, I wouldn't put it past them to go for it. I used to think that stuff like this was crazy, now I'm not so sure: http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/pies-in-the-sky-a-solution-to-global-warming/ http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/pies-in-the-sky-a-sol...
  - T-A 10y ago
    Once burned... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-10/big-oil-abandons-2-5-billion-in-u-s-arctic-drilling-rights https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-10/big-oil-a...
    - macawfish 10y ago
      May this be the beginning of the carbon bubble pop.
subpixel 10y ago
It's impossible to imagine a level of environmental degradation that would cause extraction companies to say "On second thought, let's leave that resource where it is." To wit: open-face mining the sea floor (http://www.seeker.com/worlds-first-deep-sea-mining-venture-set-to-launch-in-2019-2327856967.html http://www.seeker.com/worlds-first-deep-sea-mining-venture-s...) "The machines, each the size of a small house, are equipped with rock-crushing teeth resembling the large incisors of a dinosaur. The robots will lumber across the ocean floor on mammoth treads, grinding and chewing the encrusted seabed, sending plumes of sediment into the surrounding waters and killing marine life that gets in their way. The smallest of the robots weighs 200 tons. 'A lot of people don't realize that there are more mineral resources on the seafloor than on land," said Michael Johnston, CEO of Nautilus, by phone from the company's field office in Brisbane, Australia. "Technology has allowed us to go there.' ... Over two-dozen contracts have already been granted to explore hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean floor by a United Nations body called the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which regulates areas of the seafloor that lie outside of any national jurisdiction."

Pxtl 10y ago

Worth noting: a massive volcanic eruption of sulfur in Siberia ended almost all life on Earth once. It rained sulfuric acid with the pH of lemon juice worldwide and everything died, it took 10 million years for diversity to start building again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_...

dkarapetyan 10y ago
I think it's going to be a much slower burn this time around. More like boiling a crab very, very slowly. We had a good run but in the end the dinosaurs had the last laugh.
- AznHisoka 10y ago
  how do dinosaurs laugh?
  - tomrod 10y ago
    Nasally, if Jurassic Park 3 is to be believed.
  - appreneur 10y ago
    They survived for 300million years... We (modern humans) didn't even reach a 100,000 years of survival. Hence we are in the dinosaurs land.Earth belong to dinosaurs... Longest survived mamals.
    - sand500 10y ago
      Dinosaurs are reptiles.
mtarnovan 10y ago
That's just one of several theories explaining the cause of the extinction.
agumonkey 10y ago