![methane_bubbles[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/methane_bubbles1.jpg?quality=83)
We’ve seen all this before, but there is a twist this time, the authors of the paper are dialing back the alarm a bit.
“…authigenic carbonates observed imply that emissions have continued for more than 1,000 years at some seeps.”
From the BBC – 24 August 2014 ‘Widespread methane leakage’ from ocean floor off US coast
Researchers say they have found more than 500 bubbling methane vents on the seafloor off the US east coast.
The unexpected discovery indicates there are large volumes of the gas contained in a type of sludgy ice called methane hydrate.
There are concerns that these new seeps could be making a hitherto unnoticed contribution to global warming.
The scientists say there could be about 30,000 of these hidden methane vents worldwide.
Previous surveys along the Atlantic seaboard have shown only three seep areas beyond the edge of the US continental shelf.
Here is the sonar image:
………..
There are concerns that these new seeps could be making a hitherto unnoticed contribution to global warming……..
The scientists say that the warming of ocean temperatures might be causing these hydrates to send bubbles of gas drifting through the water column….
“But it is important to say we simply don’t have any evidence in this paper to suggest that any carbon coming from these seeps is entering the atmosphere.”
h/t to reader “Jimbo” in Tips and Notes
The paper:
Widespread methane leakage from the sea floor on the northern US Atlantic margin
- Sharke et al. Nature Geoscience (2014) doi:10.1038/ngeo2232
Methane emissions from the sea floor affect methane inputs into the atmosphere1, ocean acidification and de-oxygenation2, 3, the distribution of chemosynthetic communities and energy resources. Global methane flux from seabed cold seeps has only been estimated for continental shelves4, at 8 to 65 Tg CH4 yr−1, yet other parts of marine continental margins are also emitting methane. The US Atlantic margin has not been considered an area of widespread seepage, with only three methane seeps recognized seaward of the shelf break. However, massive upper-slope seepage related to gas hydrate degradation has been predicted for the southern part of this margin5, even though this process has previously only been recognized in the Arctic2, 6, 7. Here we use multibeam water-column backscatter data that cover 94,000 km2 of sea floor to identify about 570 gas plumes at water depths between 50 and 1,700 m between Cape Hatteras and Georges Bank on the northern US Atlantic passive margin. About 440 seeps originate at water depths that bracket the updip limit for methane hydrate stability. Contemporary upper-slope seepage there may be triggered by ongoing warming of intermediate waters, but authigenic carbonates observed imply that emissions have continued for more than 1,000 years at some seeps. Extrapolating the upper-slope seep density on this margin to the global passive margin system, we suggest that tens of thousands of seeps could be discoverable.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2232.html
you don’t have to be crazy to know there is abiotic and biotic methane. Look at Titan. How much of Earth’s hydrocarbons are abiotic? I don’t know…anyone got a resource?
“But it is important to say we simply don’t have any evidence in this paper to suggest that any carbon coming from these seeps is entering the atmosphere.”
So that’s OK then, we can sleep easy……But ! but ! it’s worse than we though, methane is deadlier than CO2 (there must be an algore-rhythm) that’s why 97% if ill-informed people want to kill all the cows.
The scientists say there could be about 30,000 of these hidden methane vents worldwide…….it’s mixing with the hidden heat!!!!!
(Thinks – must have a panic attack & run around waving hands in air & screaming “It’s a tipping point, we’re doomed )
J
August 25, 2014 at 1:25 pm
Cam_S,
You didn’t read the article abstract did you?
###
You didn’t read the AWG spinning BBC piece did you?
That is what Cam_S was quoting, via the daily mail.
kadaka (KD Knoebel)
August 25, 2014 at 1:47 pm
“This is when the nutters show up, claim this is proof of abiotic oil,..[blah blah blah] “
= = = = = = = = = = = = =
Thanks for the poisoning the wells of abiotic petroleum. Awesome!
But now be honest with yourself and everyone else: What could be more nutty than cheerfully violating the 2nd thermodynamic law just for the sake of the fantastical fossil fable?
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/17/10976.long
So one sees a very nice structure the top of which is releasing methane. DUH! I saw an estimate of technically recoverable fossil fuels dated 2006 from the Minerals Management Service MSS that estimated 37 trillion cubic feet of recoverable off shore gas just off New England alone .(Beaufort Sea is 27 tcf) Of course we are gagged. the Mesozoic sediments are hard to find on any map( but the Canadians are smiling just on the other side of the Hague line) and we are just pretending these essentially proven ( by the Canadians ) reserves don’t exist. We can’t even look as the far East blows up in front of our eyes. Putin makes his move in the Crimea and controls the pipelines to Western Europe. I call this policy a stupidity,…. criminal stupidity.. No natural oil leaks in the Gulf of Mexico either for these people who live in a fantasy world. Fantasy world, fantasy data, fantasy solutions and real world disasters because of fantasy decisions based upon someone’s wild imagination and ability to control the information that the public gets in order to make political decisions.. There should be a punishment for knowingly feeding the public fantasy information. AARGH! Just thinkin’
Note one of the authors of this report was also the author of the report you quoted in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/16/nature-puts-methane-hydrate-fears-to-rest-says-it-will-be-1000-years-before-they-make-any-impact/
Here’s a quote from Singer in today’s TWTW thread:
In AUS land there was a building prevented being constructed because the methane reading was too high. This was in the centre of a large town next door to a service station. The problem is, what is too high and what about the surrounding area which included the town!? No comment!
Isn’t it obvious? If they say this methane is entering the atmosphere they have the problem of another natural source stealing some of the warming attributed toCO2. It would diminish their anthropological evidence. They might shy away from any climate connection. Doing the right thing for perhaps the wrong reason.
Shallow as this is, my first guess is it is from biotic debris accumulated in the ocean bottom sediments.
The abiotic hydrocarbons are under the basement rocks, way way deeper. The determination that there are huge amounts of water bound up in the rocks at that level makes the formation of hydrocarbons an inevitability.
Of course methane is no problem. You can’t tax it.
Step 1) 2 NaCl (Salt) + 2 H2O -> 2 NaOH + H2 + Cl2 (Chlorine Gas)
SIGINT EX – this is an electrolysis process, please explain how this can happens in situ.
Kadaka,
I am one of the nutters to whom you refer. It is not fossil fuel.
Hydrocarbons have seeped to the surface for hundreds of million years.
200 million years of layers of carbonate rock are on display in the Grand Canyon to testify to the large amount of carbon continuously emitted from deep in the earth (the same place diamonds originate), and stored as rock by the oceans,to be recycled by tectonic action approximately 100mi down, rising back to the surface as hydrocarbons.
Upland topsoil, in the presence of adequate moisture, owe its richness to the amount of methane up welling through it.
This is not a theory. I have proved it.
I challenge you to find a plot of rich soil, dig a hole through the top soil, well into the subsoil, take an inverted stainless steel bowl into which you have drilled a hole and attach a copper tube which is long enough to extend above the topsoil. Attach a closed gas valve and refill the hole, using water to help reconsolidate the soil. Allow the gas to accumulate for a couple of days and attach the sniffer hose from a combustible gases tester available from Amazon for about $170.
I have done this test many times and it is always positive for natural gas.
The Russians became the worlds largest producer of hydrocarbons following the abiotic theory.
Thomas Gold was one of the great original thinkers of the 20th century.
Among other things, he was responsible for the theory describing the workings of the inner ear, the earth’s magnet polls reversing, and telling NASA that the moon would would be coated in fine dust.
Read the results of NASA’ orbiting of Titan. The oceans are all abiotic hydrocarbons.
All of the extra-solar system planets which I have read about which have has their atmosphere analysed contain atmospheric hydrocarbons.
Hydrocarbons have been created abioticly in a diamond press on the bench.
When I last checked, no one had made oil out of kerogen on the bench.
CH4 has very minimal IR absorption range to be of any concern.
EternalOptimist
August 25, 2014 at 2:36 pm
“I read an interesting theory many decades ago, probably in ‘Omni’
where the bermuda triangle mysteries were explained by methane hydrates”
You are probably correct. If the bubbles become abundant enough, the buoyancy of the water declines..and ships go down. There was also the mystery of five fighter aircraft that took off from Florida in the 1940s and disappeared. They were a few years ago found all within a mile of each other on the sea floor in the B. Triangle. A likely theory is that a puff of methane dense enough caused the engines to starve of oxygen and down they went. This theory was tested by “mythbusters” on a program and they concluded it highly probable. Of course there are other theories that the pilots got disoriented and didn’t know where they were – maybe they were gassed with methane – likely not wearing oxygen for low level flying.
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20115230,00.html
1) It is a natural source of fossil carbon. Human inpact may be minimal.
2) Depletion of C-13 in surface sea waters is not anymore exact indicator of human fossil burning.
3) You have changed the layout of the blog. I must say that’s fine even I am agains all changes including climate change.
So how long until someone says, “It’s worse than we thought” and “This is more ‘proof’ of ‘Global Warming'”?
Fossil carbon or new carbon? Is this another source of fossil carbon that reduces human/fossil fuel carbon?
Just wondering. It does seem that each advance in knowledge reduces the amount of impact humans and fossil fuel have on the current CO2 input to the atmosphere …..
Methane is nothing to worry about.
The most extreme scenario I’ve seen discussed is Shakhova et al (2008) (which is the abstract of a presentation, rather than a peer-reviewed paper), which reported that “we consider release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage as highly possible for abrupt release at any time…with consequent catastrophic greenhouse warming.'”
(Note: I’ve not found a longer version of the Shakhova (2008) presentation, but Chris Reynolds [who’s very much in the AGW camp] has an analysis here.)
The atmosphere currently contains about 1.8 ppmv of methane (CH4), with a mass of about 5.3 Gt. 50 Gt of methane is nearly 10 times the total amount of methane currently in the atmosphere. A sudden release of that much methane is highly implausible.
But, just for the sake of argument, let’s see what it would do if it happened.
Adding that much methane all at once would bump methane from 1.8 ppmv to 18.8 ppmv. I plugged that into U.Chicago’s NCAR Radiation Code web interface (with insolation 500, const rel hum 70%, CH4 1.8 ppm, N2O 0.3 ppm, low cloud 30%, high cloud 25%). It calculates that increasing CH4 from 1.8 ppmv to 18.8 ppmv would raise the equilibrium temperature by 1.6°C, after the amplifying effect of water vapor feedback is added.
But the actual temperature rise would certainly be much less, because temperatures would never reach equilibrium, because the CH4 spike would be of very short duration. The half-life of CH4 in the atmosphere is only about 7 years. So after seven years the CH4 level would be back down to about 10 ppmv, and NCAR-calculated equilibrium temperature increase down to just +1°C, and falling.
The U.Chicago’s MODTRAN interface calculates even less effect. MODTRAN tropical atmosphere (cumulus 0.66km-2.7km, const rel humidity, Iout=260.714) calculates only +0.92°C of warming at equilibrium, as the result of boosting CH4 from 1.8 ppmv to 18.8 ppmv.
(Note that “constant relative humidity” effectively incorporates the amplifying effect of water vapor.)
In other words, even an impossibly gigantic 50 Gt sudden methane release, which spiked CH4 levels to 10x their current level, would cause only a slight, brief bump in temperatures.
From Jerry Henson on August 25, 2014 at 5:07 pm (out of sequence):
Heating crushed oil shale in a sealed retort without oxygen to produce oil from the contained kerogen is a very old technique. This source has making oil from kerogen for lamps occurring commercially way back in 1830.
http://www.westernresourceadvocates.org/land/oilshalebasics.php
All I had to do was Google “kerogen” to find out how to make oil out of kerogen on the bench.
You have proved that moist topsoil which is rich enough to support multitudes of methane-producing bacteria and other critters, owes its richness to the byproduct of the richness. Which has truth in it, good soil is a complex symbiotic interaction, critters that produce methane support critters that eat methane which do things that support the methane producers.
You captured some methane from below the topsoil. Whoopee. Bacteria that produce methane have existed for millions of years down to miles underground. Why wouldn’t they be under your topsoil and even under your subsoil?
I’m surprised that they are surprised, the earth has been degassing since day one. Another taxpayers grant that really does not tell us anything new, just a set-up for the next grant. Maybe launch a OCO-2 type satellite just to study methane.
From Khwarizmi on August 25, 2014 at 3:36 pm (copied without the formatting):
Good example! This is clearly a non-peer-reviewed “pass through” member submission, not meant to be taken seriously. Look at the “scientific terms”:
Hilarious stuff! It says near the top of the page:
Somebody mailed this in for an April Fools Day prank, likely assisted by biotic ethanol, yes? Clearly this was never intended for serious scientific discussion.
Good find, Khwarizmi, that’s some real funny biotic material!
Kadaka
The reason to dig through the topsoil is to get below the biological material from which methanogens could produce methane. In the topsoil, methanatropes ingest the methane, use the hydrogen for energy and excrete the carbon.
Very rich topsoil requires a very large amount of energy input to continue to be rich.
It does not “owe its richness to the byproduct of the richness”.
Richness of topsoil is not spontaneously generated. If it were, then areas such as the soil around Atlanta would be rich, but it is not.The granite shield is just under the surface, blocking most of the up welling methane and thus the energy supply which is required to build rich topsoil .
The deep life that you describe does not exist because it exists. It requires a food source. That original source is hydrocarbons.
Just as deep ocean “smoker” ecosystems are powered by up welling methane, so is topsoil.
I am new to blogs and it appears that I must learn how to post links on a blog. Please google “Deep-Sea Methane Ecosystem Found In Atlantic.
I believe that “spontaneous generation” has previously been disproved.
When you crush and heat kerogen bearing shale, you get kerogen, not oil.
“but researchers say there’s no cause for alarm”
What kind of talk is that??!
Hm?
It is obvious proof that someone is herding cattles in giant caves under the seabed. As we know, the methan comes from cattle farts. How else could one explain methane coming from down there? Hence this is proven now.
I guess it is Blofield, known from the James Bond movies. He had a liking for underwater establishments.