From the GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
Boulder, Colo., USA: Cretaceous climate warming led to a significant methane release from the seafloor, indicating potential for similar destabilization of gas hydrates under modern global warming. A field campaign on the remote Ellef Ringnes Island, Canadian High Arctic, discovered an astounding number of methane seep mounds in Cretaceous age sediments.
Seep mounds are carbonate deposits, often hosting unique fauna, which form at sites of methane leakage into the seafloor. Over 130 were found covering over 10,000 square kilometers of the Cretaceous sea floor. They occurred over a very short time interval immediately following onset of Cretaceous global warming, suggesting that the warming destabilized gas hydrates and released a large burb of methane. Given that methane has 20 times the impact of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, such a release could have accelerated global warming at that time. This discovery supports concerns of potential destabilization of modern methane hydrates.
Background
A field campaign was run during 2009-2011 to map the geology of Ellef Ringnes Island. Around the same size as Jamaica, this is one of the most remote and difficult to access islands in the Canadian High Arctic, and as such not much was known about the geology. A remote helicopter supported field camp was established in 2009, with a peak of 30 geoscientists working from the camp in 2010 as part of the Geological Survey of Canada’s GEM Program. The island, and its neighbor Amund Ringnes Island, were named after brothers who founded Norway’s Ringnes Brewery that funded the exploration of the region conducted by Otto Sverdrup in the early 1900s
As part of this work, Krista Williscroft, Stephen Grasby, and colleagues intended to reinvestigate strange spaghetti-like rock that was noticed, but the origin not understood, during the first geologic mapping of the island in the 1970s. Years later, a geologist saw a sample of this feature sitting on his colleague’s desk and was intrigued by its spaghetti like nature. Chemical analyses revealed that this was a carbonate rock formed by the oxidation of methane, and the spaghetti texture was formed by fossil tube worms. This was shortly after the first discovery of methane cold seeps in the modern oceans and became the first recognition of such features in the geologic record. In this case, it was known to have formed during the Cretaceous, the time of the dinosaurs roamed the earth, around 110 million years ago. Sadly, these original samples were lost, and given the remoteness of the location, it was not possible to gain more, limiting any further work.
Methane Cold Seeps
Methane cold seeps are similar to the more famous black smokers in that they form isolated ecosystems as oasis in the deep ocean, but are lower temperatures and form away from mid-ocean ridges. They forms at sites were natural methane gas leaks into seawater. Microbes oxidase this methane as a source of energy and produce carbonate deposits as a by-product. In the modern world, these sites are characterized by an unusual abundance of tube worms, bivalves (clams), molluscs, and other animals that survive on the microbial mats that grow there. In the rock record, they stand out as very unusual features that have this strange spaghetti-like appearance related to fossil tube worms and an abundance of other fossils. As they form in deep water they also stand out as resistant carbonate mounds in rock that is otherwise easily eroded shale.
New Discovery
In 2010 the intention was to revisit the site first discovered in the 1970s. It stood out as a small mound on the otherwise rolling landscape of arctic tundra. From this site another mound could be seen in the distance, which raised the tantalizing possibility of a second site. Some hard walking through thick mud paid off when it was reached, revealing another fossil methane seep. From there a further mound could be seen, and on and on. This lead to more than four weeks of trudging from mound to mound through muddy tundra, and the discovery of over 130 methane seep mounds in the rock record. This is now one of the most extensive sites of these features known anywhere in the world, covering more than 10,000 square kilometers.
Implications
A key feature of this discovery is recognition that all the seep mounds formed during a very narrow range of geologic time. Because they form by leakage of methane into seawater it implies that something at that time caused a large release of methane into the ocean. The timing is coincident with a period of global warming, and Williscroft and colleagues suggest that it was this warming that released methane frozen as methane hydrates in the sea floor, as a relatively sudden methane “burp.” If correct, this has important implications for modern warming of the Arctic Ocean. Similar frozen methane hydrates occur throughout the same arctic region as they did in the past, and warming of the ocean and release of this methane is of key concern as methane is 20x the impact of CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Release of methane hydrates has previously been suggested as a mechanism to drive runaway greenhouse events, as warming oceans releases trapped methane that causes further warming and releases more methane. The extensive methane seep mounds across the remote arctic island of Ellef Ringnes may be a caution from the past regarding potential impacts of modern warming of the Arctic Ocean.
FEATURED ARTICLE
Extensive Cretaceous methane seepage, Ellef Ringnes Island, Canadian High Arctic
Krista Williscroft, Stephen E. Grasby, Benoit Beauchamp, Crispin T.S. Little, Keith Dewing, Daniel Birgel, Terry Poulton, and Krzysztof Hryniewicz; http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/content/early/2017/04/07/B31601.1.abstract.
Contact: Steve Grasby, steve.grasby@canada.ca. A higher-resolution version of each image is available from Steven Grasby.
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If it takes Cretaceous-level heat to melt the methane hydrates, then no worries. There is no way in the ice age which has gripped earth for the past 34 million years that the planet will get anywhere near the warmth and pole-to-pole equanimity of the Cretaceous, when the Arctic was as balmy as Florida.
Zooming in on North America, with the Interior Seaway starting to close:
http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/50080dedecad04db3500000a-1200/late-cretaceous-100-million-years-ago.jpg
http://www.burgess-shale.rom.on.ca/images/transcripts/slideshow_plate_tectonics_06.jpg
Map of 100 Ma.
Another “seaway” is of interest: The formation of the Isthmus of Panama partitioned the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and changed global ocean circulation. Note in the image above for the Middle Cretaceous, the Central American Seaway is open and stays open until about 2.5-3.0 Million years ago.
Ref: http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/how-the-isthmus-of-panama-put-ice-in-the-arctic
I should add that in the Late Cretaceous the two continents drew close enough that sauropods from South America were able to recolonize North America. As the Caribbean Plate passed between the two larger plates, a land connection either briefly was formed, or, more likely, the sea was shallow enough and dotted with sufficient islands for enormous titanosaurs to float or walk into North America. Some paleontologists however think that Alamosaurus came from Asia rather than South America, or that it evolved in North America, with a long fossil gap and ghost lineage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alamosaurus#Habitat_and_geographic_origin
Titanosaurs may have floated similarly to their brachiosaur kin, which probably made the “manus-only” trackways discovered:
http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/tmp/floating_sauropods.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macronaria
Yup. The formation of the isthmus initiated NH ice sheet formation. It also led to a catastrophe for indigenous South American species. Although a few South American species managed to establish themselves in North America and diversify, northern invaders devastated the long-isolated southerners.
It appears that a shallow seaway briefly reopened around 1.8 Ma, which is when the Pleistocene used to start, before the last age of the Pliocene was properly added to it.
First I do not have any phd or science degree — but I can smell when science is lying to me.
questions:
What is a science ?
‘Is science based on empirical evidence?’
It should not be “science has shown” but “this experiment, this effect, has shown.” And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments–but be patient and listen to all the evidence–to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.
It is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. To make progress in understanding, we must remain modest and allow that we do not know. Nothing is certain or proved beyond all doubt.
For several centuries, modern science was pretty much a free intellectual market populated by independent entrepreneurs who shared the goal of understanding how the world works. Nowadays it’s a corporate enterprise where patents, pay-offs, prestige, and power take priority over getting at the scientific truth, and the powers-that-be have established knowledge monopolies.
The scientists all stuck their hands into the bottomless pit of governmental largesse, funded through coercive taxation,
Of course, there’s always been resistance to change in science, as in other human activities. But this degree of suppression of minority views and the use of gutter language and character assassination makes it seem like a new phenomenon. At least it has seemed so to the people who have found themselves suddenly ejected from mainstream discourse and resources.
But science nowadays IS like this: Disagree with the conventional contemporary scientific wisdom and you won’t get grants, won’t get published, will be compared to Holocaust deniers.
earth is a complex system
are computer models same as experiment
what are you going to put in calculation and
computer models, which data, how many..
back to first question what is science what is pseudoscience?
Given that methane has 20 times the impact of CO2 as a greenhouse gas
I see they left out the “pound for pound” B.S. If they had included it, they could have bumped it up to 86 times the impact of CO2.
The popular press is getting away with this non-sense. Various legislatures around the country and world I suppose are passing laws and regulations with regard to methane regulation. The press is using the 20 or 86 times the impact crap to hide the fact that a 100% increase in methane would only run the temperature up around two tenths of a degree, and at today’s rates it would take over 250 years.
A 100% increase in methane would be 2 parts per million (PPM) and a similar mass of CO2 (the pound for pound B.S.) wouldn’t be 2 PPM, it would only be about 0.7 ppm, and since CO2 is in the air at 400 ppm, that amounts to an increase of about 0.2% and 2% of CO2’s absolute climate sensitivity of 1.2K multiplied by 86 comes to about 0.2K .
That’s a round about way to get to the answer, but for ordinary mortals, the direct route of trying to find out what the climate sensitivity of methane is i.e., “How much will temperatures rise per doubling?” is pretty much a blind alley. The powers that run the show really don’t want you to know, they’d rather scare you with the 86 times the impact hobgoblin.
Talk about not doing your homework . About 10 minutes surfing the internet is all that it takes to know that Ellef Ringnes Island is in the Sverdrup basin – a basin that has a discovered in place resource of 19.8 Trillion Cubic Feet and 1.9 Billion barrels of oil – a huge potential source of seafloor methane, as opposed to destabilized hydrate from global warming
Reference :
http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/pdfz/abstracts/pdf/2013/90170cspg/abstracts/ndx_menel.pdf.html
A breached trap or migration pathway to the seafloor would cause this same observed rock formations in the Cretaceous. This possibility has been directly quoted in the literature. Reference :
http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/abstracts/pdf/2013/90170cspg/abstracts/ndx_dew.pdf
See page 3 : “the old age of hydrocarbon generation means that most hydrocarbons have likely been lost due to leakage or degradation. Preservation in some traps may be possible where salt or anhydrite have acted as a seal.” Leakage would cause the same observed strata in the Cretaceous.
Also, given the Cretaceous timing, there was a widespread volcanic event during this time. See page 2 of the above reference. Also a potential cause of trap breaches and of locally heating up source rocks, causing methane to seep to the seafloor.
The fact that this is in a known hydrocarbon basin and no geologic processes were even mentioned as possible causes & the authors go straight for “global warming” says one of 2 things to me :
1) they are horrible researchers and have no idea what they are doing
2) The are culpable inactively ignoring these possibilities and trying to promote global waming alarmism.
In either case …. massive FAIL on their part
http://www.geoconvention.com/archives/2012/204_GC2012_Petroleum_Resources_of_Sverdrup_Basin.pdf
The elephant in the room, or one of the herd, is that our emissions have plateau-ed. But CO2 rise has not. Let’s all go home and figure out why. Nothing else matters now re CAGW.
North America has been a CO2 sink for decades, and our emissions have been declining for years. Not entirely due to the Great Recession 2.0, energy efficiency is often economically efficient. And then there is fracking, which is shifting fuel usage patterns in the US.
Now, lets look at the reconstructed paleoclimatic temperature “record”.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.gif
Gee, modern CO2 levels are abnormally low.
And so are temperatures.
Very abnormally low.
And yet these people speak as if a few degrees of warming could and likely will have all manner of awful implications because it is unprecedented.
There have been warmer years in the past hundred years, warmer centuries in the past thousand years, warmer interglacials in the past million years…
It is too cold, not too warm!
And warmer is better and desirable, not a potential catastrophe to be feared.
They sure made the lies big.
Mystery is, how did so many come to buy them?
In fact over just the last billion years (beyond that is not relevant) both CO2 and Temperature have been significantly higher at least 90% of the time for CO2 and 95% of the time for Temperature.
Tap it fools. Natural gas is the best.
If global warming induced methane caused a climate tipping point then such would have happened during the previous interglacial period, the Eemian, which was warmer than the current interglacial period with more ice cap melting and higher sea levels. But such a tipping point was never encountered and the Eemian was followed by the last ice age. For at least the past 500 million years, the Earth’s climate has been stable enough for life to evolve. We are here.
Hey. The Metane is already haunting us, but we have a helper in the ocean stratification. But when do this helper turn against us?
Thank you for the link Richard Treadgold. “Methane may have less effect on the atmosphere than climate scientists fear. This research letter published in GRL last May”
“”We are talking about 250 active methane seeps found at relatively shallow depths: 90 to 150 meters” says oceanographer Benedicte Ferré from CAGE.
According to her, it is the sea itself that adds obstacles to methane emissions to the atmosphere in the summer. The weather is generally calm during summer, with little wind. This leads to stratification of the water column whereby layers of different density form, much like oil over water.
This means there is no or low exchange of water masses between the surface layer and the layers below. A natural barrier occurs, acting as a ceiling, preventing the methane from reaching the surface.But this condition does not last forever: wind blowing over the ocean can mix these layers, causing this natural barrier to disappear. Thus the methane may break the surface and enter the atmosphere.”
Faulty cause and effect. Clathrate dissociation is strongly favored by reduced pressures than increased temperatures. It was falling sea levels which caused the dissociation.
The pressure stability makes for a negative feedback mechanism where continental glaciation drops sea level, releasing methane. Likewise, rising sea levels confer greater stability to clathrate deposits.
Yup.
As I noted above, the epicontinental seas were receding in the Albian Age, last of the Early Cretaceous Epoch. Thus lower pressure is a reasonable hypothesis to explain the observations.
It’s crazy that there is no Middle Cretaceous Epoch, since the ages in its middle are distinctive, and the Period is longer than the Triassic and Jurassic, both of which do have three epochs. Divvying up equally the 12 Cretaceous ages into three epochs of four ages each would actually work pretty well.
There was an ocean anoxic event in the early Aptian Age, so it’s a prime candidate for first age of a Middle Cretaceous Epoch. Another one occurred during the Turonian, when ichthyosaurs died off, so it makes a natural break between Middle and Late Cretaceous Epochs.
The mid-Cretaceous was even warmer than earlier and later in the period.
Not hypothetical. Cause and effect. Methane clathrate differs from ice in density in that void space is filled with methane so it is negatively buoyant. So it exists with thermocline protection. Furthermore, biogenic methane clathrate is formed beneath mud, reducing convective effects. Yes, it can drift but thermodynamics moves it to more stable regions. I’ve seen it creep down pipes, just keeping ahead of thermal dissociation regions and still obstructing flow. Methane clathrates are major concern in natural gas pipelines and as such, flow assurance has studied the properties extensively. The fastest solution to obstruction is reduction of pressure and chemical (alcohol and or glycol). Heat is worthless.
Bzzzttt!!!
“Gas Hydrate Breakdown Unlikely to Cause Massive Greenhouse Gas Release”
https://www.usgs.gov/news/gas-hydrate-breakdown-unlikely-cause-massive-greenhouse-gas-release
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/13/defusing-the-arctic-methane-time-bomb/
MIS-11 peaked a full 5°C warmer than the Holocene Climatic Optimum, which was 1-2°C warmer than the present. The data from Melles et al., 2012 are available from NOAA’s paleoclimatology library. And it is clearly obvious that Arctic summers were much warmer than either the Eemian/Sangamonian (MIS-5e) and the Holocene (MIS-1)…
Referring back to Vaks et al., 2013, we can see that there is no evidence of widespread permafrost melting above 60°N since the beginning of MIS-11…
Another proof of natural change. While Ellef Ringnes Island’s seep mounds burp, Yellowstone caldera is flatulent. And homo sapiens is on the passenger’s seat observing it all.
As part of this work, Krista Williscroft, Stephen Grasby, and colleagues intended to reinvestigate strange spaghetti-like rock that was noticed, but the origin not understood, during the first geologic mapping of the island in the 1970s.
What a co-incidence. The future history books editors will have ample of material to illustrate the modern anthropocentric era.
In fiction, there’s John Barnes’ SF book “Mother of Storms”, about the effects when a man-made incident releases huge amounts of methane from Arctic clathrates. The result is a permanent hurricane that spins off ‘daughters’. I’m not sure just how improbable that is, but it’s a good read!
Hmm. See
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/09/an-engineers-explanation-of-climate-change/
And the “sawtooth” nature of the glaciation cycle. This could be an explanation for the abrupt rise.
Norway and Canada showed great wisdom in not going to war over possession of the island.
Drill. Baby! Drill! Methane has all manner of uses.
They write this nonsense as innocently as if they themselves believed in it.
And what about the massive amounts of Methane leaking into the atmosphere between Venezuela and the Caribbean where the thunderstorms cause spectacular fireworks above these leaks.