Methane Bubble to Kill Us All

May 30th, 2008

Every time something about the climate comes up I like to over-react. I like to make it seem as if we are all going to die since we cannot escape the fact that every single thing to do with the climate right now is huge news. So many things are said about the climate that it is hard to know what is true, or just over-reaction. Camps are always divided, and guys like Al Gore become bigger celebrities for producing self-promoted documentaries that mention global warming, but really tell us very little. Give the man a Nobel Prize.

This time we are talking about something that happened 600+ Billion years ago (sorry 6000 year old Earth supporters). An abrupt release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, about 635 million years ago from ice sheets that then extended to Earth’s low latitudes caused a dramatic shift in climate, triggering a series of events that resulted in global warming and effectively ended the last “snowball” ice age, a UC Riverside-led study reports.

So…this is happening again?

“Our findings document an abrupt and catastrophic means of global warming that abruptly led from a very cold, seemingly stable climate state to a very warm also stable climate state with no pause in between,” said Martin Kennedy, a professor of geology in the Department of Earth Sciences, who led the research team.”

“This tells us about the mechanism, which exists, but is dormant today, as well as the rate of change,” he added. “What we now need to know is the sensitivity of the trigger: how much forcing does it take to move from one stable state to the other, and are we approaching something like that today with current carbon dioxide warming.”

This is far too complicated for celebrities to understand so you probably won’t hear a whole lot about it while they prance around in their sexy shoes telling us that we need to stop passing gas into the atmosphere.

According to the study, methane clathrate destabilization acted as a runaway feedback to increased warming, and was the tipping point that ended the last snowball Earth. (The snowball Earth hypothesis posits that the Earth was covered from pole to pole in a thick sheet of ice for millions of years at a time.)

“Once methane was released at low latitudes from destabilization in front of ice sheets, warming caused other clathrates to destabilize because clathrates are held in a temperature-pressure balance of a few degrees,” Kennedy said. “But not all the Earth’s methane has been released as yet. These same methane clathrates are present today in the Arctic permafrost as well as below sea level at the continental margins of the ocean, and remain dormant until triggered by warming.

“This is a major concern because it’s possible that only a little warming can unleash this trapped methane. Unzippering the methane reservoir could potentially warm the Earth tens of degrees, and the mechanism could be geologically very rapid. Such a violent, zipper-like opening of the clathrates could have triggered a catastrophic climate and biogeochemical reorganization of the ocean and atmosphere around 635 million years ago.”

We are so doomed. Live like today is the last day of your life and don’t worry about this crap.