Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 11/29/2010 4:29:42 AM PST by publius1
CHERSKY, Russia | The Russian scientist shuffles across the frozen lake, scuffing aside ankle-deep snow until he finds a cluster of bubbles trapped under the ice. With a cigarette lighter in one hand and a knife in the other, he lances the ice like a blister. Methane whooshes out and bursts into a thin blue flame.
Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane - a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide - at a perilous rate.
Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.
"Here, total carbon storage is like all the rain forests of our planet put together," says the scientist, Sergey Zimov....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Methane whooshes out and bursts into a thin blue flame.Reminds me of Keith Olbermann.
Methane bubbling to the surface sounds to me like a great untapped source of energy.
Isn’t there a way to take advantage of it?
Et tu, Washington Times?
the earth has been warmer than it is now... even in the recent past of the last 2000 years....we are coming out of the little ice age now (20th and 21st century).
what did they do back then???
they lived and died.
If they’re smart, they’re busy inventing a way to capture all that methane and burn it for electricity.
There are hundreds of trillion cubic feet of methane locked up in hydrate form.
This has happened before, and will happen again.
Obama’s fault.
The last chapter of The Book describes a world mostly complacent to a central figure.
THAT is the motion we feel today and common sense for the good of mankind is not part of that ride.
Landfills leak methane gas. This resource can be captured by a series of shallow wells and a gathering system. The gas is either flared or used to drive a generator.
So, how old is that ice?
Turns out the mountains are anywhere from 300 million to 500 million years old ~ which makes them among the oldest such formations on Earth. You recall, of course, that the time-frame takes us back to the Carboniferous Age ~ which had a denser, thicker atmosphere with giant flying insects, and huge millipedes, and swamps making coal formations.
Those mountains are like they're not a day older than they were then and that's because they have not, for the most part, ever been affected by erosion!
That's right ~ it never happened. That ice formed; stayed there for hundreds of millions of years (maybe even half a billion years) and didn't budge. The only erosion in the area formed at the shoreline, and that lasted only a short time in geologic terms.
It's almost like Snowball Earth happened, things warmed up, but not everywhere, and there's a place that's just as cold now as it was then.
You'd best believe that these recently reported discoveries about the Gamburtsev Mountain Range are shaking up the scientific world. (NOTE: You want to look for a report issued in November 2010 ~ the other stuff on the net is kind of dated).
It thawed more than the present before (e.g. 1000 years ago) and was not unpleasant.
There are hundreds of trillion cubic feet of methane locked up in hydrate form.
So? Why don't you explain that only a small part is near the surface, the rest is locked under permafrost that is not going anywhere (*)
This has happened before, and will happen again.
The big paleo methane releases came from the ocean bottom.
Don't be a Chicken Little.
(*) even if you believe the catastrophic propagandistic models of 10C warming in Siberia, that permafrost is still not going anywhere.
Looks like the chilly weather here slowed down my post to just after yours. I blame global warming.
Sounds like a good premise for a bad movie.
What’s going to happen if a Siberian lights a fart? Doomsday?
Isn’t there a way to take advantage of it?*
THIS IS GREAT NEWS!
I've heard of the methane trapped in the ice up North.
We will have a very large supply of natural gas.
Climate change via greenhouse gas is nonsense (or at the very worse negligible).
This is not anything to worry about. It's good news for all but the Global Alarmists.
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