North Slope Surface Melting Fast - Rapid Methane Release Part Of Process

[hatrack]

Truck-size wedges of underground ice that have remained in place for thousands of years on Alaska's North Slope seem to be thawing, according to a scientist doing work for an oil company there. Permafrost scientist Torre Jorgenson of Alaska Biological Research, Inc. was checking out an area west of the Colville River recently when he noticed water-filled pits that weren't in Navy photographs of the area from 1945.

"We were doing baseline studies on permafrost stability for ConocoPhillips and were looking at lake erosion, but when we saw the historical photos we said 'Wow, there's a lot going on here,"' Jorgenson said.

EDIT

The ice wedges that are thawing on the North Slope are special features of a cold landscape, Jorgenson said, and are not to be confused with the deep permafrost locked in the soil beneath them. "We're not talking about (typical) permafrost disappearing up there; it's still pretty cold permafrost and it's 600 meters (about 1,800 feet) deep in places," Jorgenson said. "It's not going to disappear anytime soon."

EDIT

When working around the collapse pits, Jorgenson, Shur and Pullman also noticed "a violent degassing of methane." Methane, a greenhouse gas four times as effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, is in large supply in the frozen areas of the world. The gas is a product of decomposition of plants, and frozen ground locks it in. "When we were walking in these troughs and stirring things up, the water was roiling with (methane) bubbles," Jorgenson said. "You can smell it escaping, and we've lit it with a match."

EDIT

http://www.sitnews.us/0206news/022506/022506_ak_science.html

[phantom power]

1. roiling with methane bubbles?

Oh fuck(tm).

[jpak]

4. Before the Clean Water Act

Maine paper mills dumped thousands of tons of wood waste into Maine rivers each year.

In the summer, the sediments and dam impoundments would go anaerobic and the rivers would *quite literally* boil with methane emissions - imagine a river surface in rain storm and that's what it was like.

It's not too hard to imagine this happening in permafrost thaw zones as well...

[phantom power]

5. I'm trying to imagine it happening over 4 million square miles.

Spooky.

[Dead_Parrot]

6. Let me just reiterate that point:

Oh fuck...

[skids]

10. I think I'll change my sig line too.

:hurts: Phew! I feel much better.

[Dead_Parrot]

11. ROFL

Damn, why didn't I think of that!

[skids]

12. Feel free...

...we could make it into a movement... oops... now I've done it...

[Ezlivin]

2. Yeah, but Jesus is coming tomorrow and it won't matter

Even if he doesn't, why pollute your mind with this negative stuff?

:sarcasm:

(In case you were wondering.)

[Delphinus]

13. But aren't those who think that going against

one of the fundamental basics in the book: take care of the animals, plants, earth? Or does having dominion give them the right to harm everything around them?

[Odin2005]

3. Shit, Methane is a 20x more pontent GHG than CO2

This is not good, not good at all.

[phantom power]

7. How about that. He was out there doing work for an oil company.

[Dead_Parrot]

8. I imagine they don't get much fed funding these days... nt

[bananas]

9. Some good news

"The collapsing pits, which may someday cover up to 30 percent of the lowland landscape, appear to release methane when they first collapse, but then accumulate carbon as the wedges become overgrown with sedges and peat, Jorgenson said."

There's a couple of interesting photos with the article.