
Release of methane gas from the seafloor in the Southern Hemisphere - iagovar
https://lnu.se/en/meet-linnaeus-university/current/news/2020/massive-release-of-methane-gas-from-the-seafloor-linked-to-global-warming-discovered-for-the-first-time-in-the-southern-hemisphere/
======
chrisweekly
Yikes.

"Gas hydrate is an ice-like substance formed by water and methane at depths of
several hundred metres at the bottom of our oceans at high pressure and low
temperatures. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, roughly 25 times more potent
than carbon dioxide, and it is estimated that methane frozen in these
sediments constitute the largest organic carbon reservoir on Earth. The fact
that methane gas has now started leaking out through gas hydrate dissociation
is not good news for the climate."

~~~
mattmanser
Yikes like the clathrate gun that turned out to be nonsense, or yikes as in
it's actually a threat? Not saying climate change isn't something to be
worried about, but this article doesn't say if it'll release like 10% of
yearly methane, or like 0.00001% and Ketzer's just trying to pump his
publication count.

What I would really love to see is an indepedant website ranking all the
threats. How bad is global shipping vs leaving your lights on? Or the
clathrate gun vs burning oil fields? Or recycling your plastic vs throwing
your plastic shit in the river in 3rd world countries?

Like there's was a dip in CO2 emiisions during covid, but only like a 15%.
Who's producing the rest? 'cause it's now obviously not most of the population
of the world who get lectured about recycling, it's obviously a small number
of companies, which I think most of us would suspect probably has a high
intersection with the small number of people hoarding wealth in the world.

~~~
baron_harkonnen
> Like there's was a dip in CO2 emiisions during covid, but only like a 15%.
> Who's producing the rest?

While I agree very much about the absurd logic of trying to put the solutions
to climate change on individuals, I am honestly perplexed that you don't seem
to understand how all of your daily consumption contributes to climate change.

CO2 emissions doesn't just come from driving your car. If you ordered anything
delivered from amazon that created CO2, if you live in a developing city your
environment creates CO2, if you consume food that is grown non-locally or that
uses fertilizer that also create CO2.

It's not just a "small number of companies" it's every company and every part
of our modern life. Look around you and I can assure you that most of the
things you see where shipped around the globe using ships powered by bunker
fuel, they were made with materials gathered using a non-trivial amount of
non-renewable energy.

Again, I agree that we can't expect that individually we'll all radically
alter our lives and live like it's 1800, but it is essential to realize who
much of your current way of live contributes to the enormous production of
CO2.

The fact that things slowed down and we decreased emissions by some notable
percentage but we suffered incredible economic consequences for this show just
how unsustainable our entire way of life is.

~~~
Red_Leaves_Flyy
Okay. So I'm a poor blue voting unskilled person in a rural blue district.
What can I possibly do to have a positive measurable effect on global GHG
emissions?

~~~
bigiain
The highest impact things an individual can do, roughly in order are: Don't
have children. Don't own a car. Don't fly internationally. Don't eat meat.
Don't eat dairy. Don't eat imported food.

And you don't need to be a hardline child-free bicycle riding vegan hippy to
make a difference.

Reductions in all those things will make a difference. Have fewer children.
Choose to own a more efficient car and choose to drive it less. Reduce your
long distance and international travel. Eat more plant based food and less
meat and dairy. Eat more locally sourced and seasonal food. And there are
other lesser impact things too: live in a smaller and better insulated house.
Prioritise efficiency higher - choose to buy more efficient appliances. Use
low energy lighting. Choose to live near where you work/play/socialise. Choose
lower carbon impact hobbies and recreation, perhaps a sailing boat instead of
a ski boat? Perhaps athletic sports instead of Nascar?

At a bigger picture level. Vote for the planet, appropriately prioritise
climate change policies in your voting choices (and with two party politics,
this can be difficult to do, don't vote in a facist just because they're a
treehugger, but try to also not vote in your own self-interest if that
candidate is deeply in bed with the fossil fuel lobby). Focus your career
towards ecologically sound companies/industries where you can - actively seek
and choose jobs with climate change in mind, if you have a choice between two
roles consider carefully before jumping to the slightly higher paid fossil
fuel job. When making or contributing to decisions at work, ensure
consideration for climate impact is brought up where appropriate.

And make a noise. Be publicly unsatisfied, even if you have no solutions. Let
other people know you care, even if you can't see any real way to make a
difference yourself.

~~~
rorykoehler
Can we stop with the don't have children advice. It's one step away from
telling people to go kill themselves. People can choose to have children or
not but it is not constructive to tell people to have or not have children.
For most of us not having children will render saving the planet (as in making
it habitable for humans) a meaningless exercise.

~~~
devdas
The impact of having a child in the first world is huge. You could live as
close to a third world lower middle class lifestyle as possible and have one
child.

~~~
DontTellAnyone
The impact of immigration is even bigger. All first world nations have
declining birth rates now and would reduce their population numbers
substantially without immigration. Yet in many countries reach record
population numbers on a yearly basis - because millions of immigrants keep
pouring in.

I'd rather stop immigration before further driving our birth rates down and
leaving world of the future to the low intelligence populations that are
currently driving population growth on a global scale. The only ones following
this "don't have children because of the climate" advice are those intelligent
enough to do so. The whole thing is completely dysgenic in its nature.

~~~
rorykoehler
I think you word you’re looking for is educated. Small but significant
difference.

------
henearkr
Some point that is not very clear if we read the article shallowly: the
methane is not yet leaked to the ocean's surface, for now it is just melted,
then dissolved into the water, and microorganisms are converting it to CO2,
which adds a huge new source of CO2 for our already overloaded system.

I wonder how far away in the future is the point where the methane would
actually raise quicker than bacteria are able to process it.

------
tda
I wonder if there is potential for enough methane hydrate turning gaseous that
it drives a top to bottom current, bringing warm surface water to greater
depths and thus creating a runaway effect where the ocean would seem to be
boiling violently from all the methane being released. I had a nightmare about
this the other day after seeing the tundra pits, no idea if this is remotely
feasible

~~~
zaarn
I think such a runaway effect might be more likely than people think. Such
places could also still be deceptively quiet on the surface if it's only
exchanging water-dissolved methane. It could turn boiling fast and sink ships
due to lack of surface tension and rapid decrease in average water density.

The Swarm by Schätzing depicted a scenario like this, concluding in the
runaway being fast enough to eventually cause the clathrate to detonate,
causing a large scale tsunami in the north sea of Europe.

------
sulam
This mechanism and permafrost melt are two of the main feedback loops
associated with non-anthropogenic warming. Whether they're properly accounted
for in climate models is a key question.

~~~
Daishiman
They're not.

The IPCC reports account for a lot of things but for political reasons have
been conservative in many of their estimates because _certain countries_ are
not fond of the implications of our sustainable lifestyle.

~~~
sergeykish
> our sustainable lifestyle

It is hard to imagine where you live [1], somewhere in Africa? And these
"certain countries" evangelize consumerism?

Or is it a typo in "our _unsustainable_ lifestyle"? Can't understand it
either. Negative change in CO₂ emissions is a rare event [2].

[1] [https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-
co2](https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-co2)

[2] [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/absolute-change-
co2](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/absolute-change-co2)

~~~
sergeykish
Could you please explain downvotes?

Even entire world 0 tonnes per capita emissions today will result in 1.5°C
warming [1].

How about 2°C [2]? Maybe with 0.1 tonnes per capita, 0.78 Gtonne worldwide.
That's [3]

    
    
        Democratic Republic of Congo   0.02 t
        Somalia                        0.05 t  
        Burundi                        0.05 t  
        Central African Republic       0.06 t  
        Chad                           0.07 t  
        Malawi                         0.08 t  
        Rwanda                         0.09 t  
        Niger                          0.10 t
    

Current policies produce in 3°C warming [4]. No change is 4–5°C.

[1]
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-15c](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-15c)

[2]
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-2c](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-2c)

[3] [https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-
co2](https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-co2)

[4] [https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-
emis...](https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-
emissions#current-climate-policies-will-reduce-emissions-but-not-quickly-
enough-to-reach-international-targets)

------
waiseristy
Do we have historic evidence of runaway methane induced warming? It seems
crazy that we are seeing these effects, but have nothing(?) in the geological
records of these cataclysmic events

~~~
sci_prog
Yes we do, but it's only a hypothesis. This was part of my PhD dissertation
and one of my committee members is the world's expert on this topic. His name
is Gerald (Jerry) Dickens. We believe this happened approximately 55 million
years ago during an event called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM),
an extreme global warming event. I've published a couple papers on this topic.

The way this works is, we run a computer model and try to come up with a
scenario which matches the observations from that time period the best. And
seems like the extreme warning that happened during the PETM was likely due to
methane hydrate dissociation. I can link a few scientific papers if anyone is
interested.

~~~
echelon
What were the temperatures and sea levels like at the time? Were there any
major extinction events that coincided with it?

Edit :
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_Thermal_Max...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_Thermal_Maximum)

This is a good write-up. I'd still appreciate big picture commentary from
domain experts, though.

~~~
sci_prog
In short, there was no major extinction (nothing like what happened during the
end-Permian), some slow adopting benthic (deep ocean species) went extinct,
however. The reason there was no major extinction was mostly due to the fact
that the warming happened over a span of thousands of years. What we are doing
to earth today is happening at a rate at least an order of magnitude faster
than during the PETM (see the nature geoscience article I linked below),
likely even faster. That wikipedia page has a good summary but here is Jerry's
detailed scientific paper on this topic: [https://www.diva-
portal.org/smash/get/diva2:469826/FULLTEXT0...](https://www.diva-
portal.org/smash/get/diva2:469826/FULLTEXT01.pdf)

This is my PhD adviser's paper. It is best to date estimate on the rate of
carbon emissions during the PETM:
[https://www.soest.hawaii.edu/oceanography/faculty/zeebe_file...](https://www.soest.hawaii.edu/oceanography/faculty/zeebe_files/Publications/ZeebeEtAl-
NGS16.pdf)

------
dev_throw
We already have a known source of methane emissions that is ever increasing:
cattle. Cows and swine account for several metric tons of emissions every
year, factory farming accounting for most of it. Reducing this is in most
people's control.

~~~
hwillis
It may be within your control, but it's essentially irrelevant. All livestock
and manure cause <4% of the average American's emissions (bottom chart):
[http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-
factsheet](http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet)

The emissions from grains etc add up to roughly as much overall- you don't eat
the entire plant and it either rots or gets fed to cows. Obviously reducing
emissions in our food industry is a huge win- eliminating red meat would be
awesome. It's nowhere near good enough. Fossil fuels are 30x more important,
easily.

------
BurningFrog
OK, so there are some positive feedback loops for global warming. As
temperature rises, that causes other effects that in turn warms the climate
even more.

But I can't see any fundamental reason that such side effects should _add_ to
the warming. It seems just as likely that they would counteract it. It's not
like there is any plan behind it. In Physics, whatever happens happens.

So... I wonder if there is also a set of counteracting global warming side
effects that don't get reported much, since that isn't scary? Or is there some
fundamental reinforcement mechanism here that I'm not seeing?

~~~
hcknwscommenter
The biggest negative feedback loop I am aware of is clouds. Higher temp, more
moisture in the air, more clouds, greater reflection of incoming light (and
greater retention of heat, so not a clear negative loop in all scenarios).
However, as far as I can tell, clouds are a lot easier to model than the
positive feed back loops we know/suspect, albedo decrease, clathrate guns,
peat breakdown, etc. Thus, we are in a situation, where negative feedback
loops seem well accounted for and there are a few potentially catastrophic,
but perfectly plausible, positive feedback loops that are too difficult to
properly assess. It is scary.

~~~
tempestn
Are you sure clouds actually reduce warming? My understanding was that since
they retain heat through the night, but only reflect light in the day, they
actually exacerbate warming. That's why it's thought that airplane contrails
contribute to warming, since they increase cloud cover. Could be wrong though;
I don't recall where I read that exactly.

------
epicureanideal
Well at least the SpaceX Raptor engines won't be running out of fuel anytime
soon.

~~~
henearkr
(disclaimer: I know you're joking, sorry to answer so seriously ^^)

The fact it is released does not mean that it is captured (by humans).
Actually, any project to capture all of methane clathrate (because capturing
all of it is the only way to preventing it melting and leaking) would be so
titanic, really impossible, or very very difficult.

Yes we agree, Musk will never run out of methane. But the Earth will quickly
run out of capacity to process it when it's released, accelerating the
greenhouse effect, that's the real limiting factor.

~~~
usrusr
An impossibly titanic project, sure. But as long as we are burning
hydrocarbons that would have happily stayed in the ground ever after,
switching all that combustion to hydrocarbons that would escape one way or the
other anyways would be a major win.

~~~
henearkr
Of course, but even better would be to manage to reverse the global warming
and have these clathrates remain frozen...

------
cynusx
Time to release the moratorium on ocean fertilization?

~~~
henearkr
If the clathrates are really massively destabilized with raising temperatures,
no existing microorganisms could possibly stop the huge mega-bubbles of
methane that would raise bursting to the ocean surface.

Microorganisms could very well be useful, but only if the process stays slow.
But in this case, maybe there are already enough of them naturally.

~~~
haram_masala
As a biologist, I would advise against underestimating what microorganisms are
capable of.

~~~
azernik
And indeed, in this case it's already being broken down by microorganisms
before it reaches the atmosphere.

Still being broken down into CO2, but still not as bad as being released
directly into the atmosphere as CH4.

~~~
henearkr
Yes. I must apologize, my poor English grammar made my comment unclear: I was
wondering, in case of releases of methane orders of magnitude larger and
quicker than they are now, how microorganisms could possibly stop large
bubbles on their way. It is clearly not the case right now.

~~~
hcknwscommenter
Not the original commenter, but I think the point of the comment is different
from your interpretation. Typically "ocean fertilization" refers to the
concept of seeding the ocean with iron and other nutrients to encourage
blooming of oxygen generating (CO2 consuming) photosynthetic microorganisms.
The idea is not to literally consume the rising bubble as it boils off the
ocean floor, but to slow down/reverse global warming in general by reducing
atmospheric CO2.

~~~
henearkr
Ah! In this case it perfectly makes sense indeed ^^

Yes ocean fertilization is a very underrated geoengineering tool for carbon
capture and storage, that should be really looked into.

~~~
cynusx
Exactly, there are some issues though with getting iron spread out over such a
ridiculously large area of the world.

I think an efficient delivery mechanism could be to demand that plastics
slowly release iron when submerged for a longer time.

With any luck that'd clean up the plastic belt also.

Another mechanism would be to have ships and planes emit iron when they travel
over these areas

~~~
henearkr
Hmm... plastic or airplane pollution is just enough to create pollution
problems, but I think they it's way too small to be a suitable vector for this
kind of large scale delivery.

Micro-plastics are plentiful in the oceans in particular because they degrade
very slowly, whereas we want algal bloom to quickly devour the iron, so that
would not match.

I appreciate the funny idea though! ^^ To turn these calamities into features!

~~~
cynusx
I am not so sure about that, I think highly concentrated iron is less
productive for carbon sequestration than less concentrated iron. In addition
because the flow of plastic is constant it may lead to semi-permanent algae
rather than a boom and bust of an algae bloom.

The slow degradation of plastics is actually a feature in that sense, as a
single piece of plastic will fertilize a larger area of the ocean.

It may also lead to algae growing on the plastic and then dying, leading it to
sink and no longer represent a threat to wildlife.

------
millstone
Atmospheric methane removal seems doable, maybe a prototype for CO2 removal.
It's easier because it doesn't have to be buried: it could just be burned to
convert to CO2 with a much smaller warming impact.

~~~
ArkVark
Excess atmospheric CO2 still causes major problems with human cognition and
building ventilation.

At about 800ppm there are measurable falls in human cognitive performance.
Might not happen outside for a while, but the increase to the outdoor level
makes ventilation much more difficult.

~~~
mleonhard
I used to believe that excess CO2 causes mood/cognitive problems. I changed my
mind while participating in this discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157422](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157422)

------
nateburke
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17289-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17289-z)

------
DumbUser123
Screwed, we are.

