Increasing amounts of Arctic methane releasing into atmosphere

Methane in today’s atmosphere is a stronger greenhouse gas per molecule than CO₂, and an atmospheric concentration that can change more quickly than CO₂ can. There has been a lot of press coverage of a new paper in Science called “Extensive methane venting to the atmosphere from sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf”, talking about the instability of this important greenhouse gas.

Over 80% of the bottom water over the ESAS was found to be supersaturated with dissolved methane, and 50% of the surface water. More than 100 “hotspots’ were discovered, where large quantities of methane are escaping from the sea-floor.

The latest estimate of methane release from the shallow seas off the north coast of Russia, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS), suggests that around 8 teragrams per year of the gas are reaching the atmosphere. This is equivalent to prior estimates of methane released from ALL oceans.

Although methane is harmful to the environment, there’s no reason to fixate on methane in particular. Methane is a transient gas in the atmosphere, while CO₂ essentially accumulates in the atmosphere-ocean carbon cycle, so the climate changing from the increasing CO₂ that methane oxidizes into may be as important as the concentration of methane itself.

So just like too much of any greenhouse gas, methane [at this point] is something that isn’t entirely controllable with the little actions we do to protect our environment. We just have to deal with the consequences and do what we can so it doesn’t worsen.