Arctic

The Independent (UK) reported in an exclusive story today that scientists have discovered "chimneys" of methane -- a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide -- rising from the melting Arctic seabed.

Scientists believe sudden release of stores of methane have in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and mass extinctions.

Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University in Sweden, one of the leaders of the expedition, described the scale of the methane emissions in an email exchange sent from the Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi.

"We had a hectic finishing of the sampling programme yesterday and this past night," said Dr Gustafsson. "An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface. These 'methane chimneys' were documented on echo sounder and with seismic [instruments]."

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A fellow named Rolf Schuttenhelm has written up a proposal to build a 300 kilometer long dam in the Bering Sea to halt Arctic melting and permafrost thawing. He suggests that a 1.5 billion cubic foot wall of rock dumped into the sea would alter temperature, water salinity and water turbulence and help the Arctic stay frozen.

It's hard to know what to make of this proposal. A quick search on Google reveals a web site that identifies a Rolf Schuttenhelm this way:

Rolf is a Dutch student from the great city of Utrecht, where he spends his time studying physical geography and getting drunk with co-students. And, besides a few other hobbies, he likes to draw cartoons.

For the first time in human history, it has become possible to circumnavigate the Arctic ice cap.

New satellite images show that both the Northwest and Northeast passages are now ice free. Professor Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said the images suggested the Arctic may have entered a "death spiral" caused by global warming.

The passages are open. It's an historic event. We are going to see this more and more as the years go by.

It's news that the UK press is carrying. Here's the story in the Independent; and here's the one in the Telegraph.

But here's the one in the Houston Chronicle: it doesn't mention the historic development, only that "climatologists were eager to see whether the record low of about 1.6 million square miles" of summer ice melt in the Arctic would be duplicated again this summer.

It's like a bar of soap. If you use the soap over and over again, it gets thinner and thinner. Then all of a sudden, it could break.

Derek Mueller, Arctic expert, in the Toronto Globe and Mail, July 29, 2008

It just did. Another 4 square-kilometer chunk has snapped off the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, the largest remaining in the Arctic. It's the largest break since 2005, when a 66 square kilometer chunk snapped off.

Mueller, a leading expert on the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf:

The take-home message for me is that these ice shelves are not regenerating.

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Wow. From the AP:

Russian scientists are evacuating a research station built on an Arctic ice floe because global warming has melted the ice to a fraction of its original size, a spokesman said.

The 21-person polar research crew has lived on The North Pole-35 station since September 2007. Their expected departure date was late August 2008.

But.

The evacuation of the drifting station has been pushed up to this week, said Sergei Balyasnikov of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg...

because of global warming.

Here's the stunning melt, by the numbers:

It's another report about sea ice loss, with news worse than ever before. But the really bad news is why: because of the carbon dioxide that has already been pumped into atmosphere.