Posted on 09/01/2006 9:17:01 PM PDT by neverdem
Oil seeping from the seafloor may have contributed to climate change long before the internal combustion engine did. The petroleum deposits are rich in the powerful greenhouse gas methane, which, according to a new study, may have played a major role in two previous episodes of global warming.
Bedrock below the ocean bottom keeps a lid on oil reservoirs, but it's not an impermeable cap. Small cracks allow petroleum and methane to bubble to the surface. Once there, the petroleum oxidizes and turns to tar, which sinks. Meanwhile, the methane drifts into the atmosphere, where it makes up about 15% of the total amount of the gas sent skyward by natural sources such as wetlands and melting tundra. Humans contribute slightly more than all natural sources combined.
But does undersea methane make up a larger piece of the pie during periods of global warming? Paleo-oceanographers Tessa Hill of the University of California (UC), Davis, James Kennett of UC Santa Barbara, and collaborators attacked the question by looking at tar deposits from sediment cores taken off the Santa Barbara coast. They found 3 times more tar mixed into the sand from the last two major warming periods, 11,000 and 15,000 years ago, than was seen on average. This suggests that 3 times more oil was released from seeps during those periods, and 3 times more methane along with it, the team reports online this week in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences. The team suggests that global warming may have first melted undersea methane ice, disturbing the sea floor and opening new cracks in the oil reservoirs.
"This is a source of methane that we might have assumed in the past was stable," says Hill. "As it turns out, it's very sensitive to climate change. I would anticipate that it would be sensitive to climate change in the future as well." If methane was released similarly from all the other marine reservoirs worldwide, it would account for nearly half the increase in atmospheric methane during those warming periods, says Hill, who believes this methane may have driven further warming. The researchers acknowledge, however, that global warming would probably affect different petroleum deposits differently, so such a simultaneous release is unlikely; further research will be needed at other oil seeps around the world, they say.
The evidence from Santa Barbara is "beautiful," says Jérôme Chappellaz, an atmospheric scientist at the Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l'Environnement in St Martin d'Hères Cedex, France. But he cautions against extrapolating to all marine oil reservoirs around the world. Evidence from carbon testing of ice core samples points away from marine methane sources and toward wetlands and melting tundra, he says.
Methane and global warming "Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period and is emitted from a variety of natural and human-influenced sources."
Climatically driven emissions of hydrocarbons from marine sediments during deglaciation PNAS abstract
Deep trouble.
Methane bubbles from a tar-covered oil seep in the Santa Barbara Channel.
Credit: David Valentine
How nice.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought of them 1st :-)
interesting - global warming/methane ping.
"Marine Methane Heats Things Up"
Semper Fi Marines! Huah!
:')
Pull my tentacle.
So I guess if everyone just stops emiting methane they will be doing their part to stop global warming.
Perhaps if you don't emit your quota you can sell it back to Gov. Arnold for GREEN credits!
(Hmmm... green doesn't seem to be the right color for this type of credit).
A few years back a study was done( with your tax money), to find out how much methane was coming from cattle. They found the leading cause of global warming( before the SUV was the bain of civilization) was cow farts. They measured the frequency and duration of cow farts and came up with a figure that was greater than the emissions from a volcano eruption every day. There was discussion of cow diapers, but by that time I was crying too hard to continue.
Just imagine, cow farts, Mexican farts, German farts, dog farts, whale farts, people in nursing home farts that take iron every day, Jeeeze, we're all going to die!
Tar seeps found in 100-200 feet of water offshore Point Conception exhibit heavy oil and little gas. Benthic communities common on rocky reefs colonize older portions of the tar.
Reminds me of:
http://www.datadubai.com/oil2.htm
The “bulls,” Hieronymus discovered, were great iceberg-like mounds of jellied crude oil - bitumen - that floated up from the depths of the murky water and drifted aimlessly with the wind...
Harvesting bitumen 'bulls' on the Dead Sea.
Suicide by fart! OMG!
The KTB HoleKTB = Kontinentales Tiefbohrprogramm der Bundesrepublik Deutschland... Temperatures in the drill hole rose far faster than predicted. The expected boundary ("suture") between two old tectonic plates thought to exist at 3 km according to surface geology had not yet appeared at 7.5 km. Most interestingly, crevicular structure (crevices and pores) existed at almost all depths, even though theory said they could not because of intense pressures. And these voids were filled with fluids... Deep-living bacteria were not mentioned in the above article, but Soviet scientists claim to have pumped them up from 12 km down!
by William Corliss
Science Frontiers #90
Nov-Dec 1993
Abiogenic Gas DebateThis paper, written by J.F. Kenney of Gas Resources Corp. in Houston and three Russian co-authors... present an evaluation of the chemical potentials and related thermodynamic affinities for n-alkanes... They also briefly describe the experimental production of petroleum hydrocarbons using only wetted marble (CaCO3) and solid iron oxide (FeO), in an apparatus allowing investigation at pressures up to 50 kbar and temperatures up to 1,500° Celsius. Kenney said there is no real debate about petroleum origination. "There has not been any 'debate' about the origin of hydrocarbons for over a century," he stated. "Competent physicists, chemists, chemical engineers and men knowledgeable of thermodynamics have known that natural petroleum does not evolve from biological material since the last quarter of the 19th century." ...No one in the United States has been more associated with the theory of abiogenic petroleum than Thomas Gold, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, now retired. "The only real opponents to this story (of abiogenic origin) are in Western Europe and in the United States, and they are the professional petroleum geologists," he said.
by David Brown
November 2002
Dismissal of the Claims of a Biological Connection for Natural Petroleum.
J. F. Kenney
Joint Institute of The Physics of the Earth - Russian Academy of Sciences
Gas Resources Corporation, 11811 North Freeway, Houston, TX 77060, U.S.A.
Ac. Ye. F. Shnyukov
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Vladimirskaya Street 56, 252.601 Kiev, Ukraine
V. A. Krayushkin
Institute of Geological Sciences
O. Gonchara Street 55-B, 01054 Kiev, Ukraine
I. K. Karpov
Institute of Geochemistry - Russian Academy of Sciences
Favorskii Street 1a, 664.033 Irkutsk, RUSSIA
V. G. Kutcherov
Russian State University of Oil and Gas
Leninskii Prospect 65, 117.917 Moscow, Russia
I. N. Plotnikova
National Petroleum Company of Tatarstan (TatNeft S.A.)
Butlerov Street 45-54, 423.020 Kazan, Tatarstan, RUSSIA
excerpt
The claims which have traditionally been put forward to argue a connection between natural petroleum and biological matter have been subjected to scientific scrutiny and have been established to be baseless. The outcome of such scrutiny comes hardly as a surprise, given recognition of the constraints of thermodynamics upon the genesis of hydrocarbons.
If liquid hydrocarbons might evolve from biological detritus in the thermodynamic regime of the crust of the Earth, we could all expect to go to bed at night in our dotage, with white hair (or, at least, whatever might remain of same), a spreading waistline, and all the undesirable decrepitude of age, and to awake in the morning, clear eyed, with our hair returned of the color of our youth, with a slim waistline, a strong, flexible body, and with our sexual vigor restored. Alas, such is not to be. The merciless laws of thermodynamics do not accommodate folklore fables. Natural petroleum has no connection with biological matter.
http://www.gasresources.net/DisposalBioClaims.htm
"to awake in the morning, clear eyed, with our hair returned of the color of our youth, with a slim waistline, a strong, flexible body, and with our sexual vigor restored."
Stinkin' thermodynamics. Gonna go bust it in the haid.
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