Russian Scientist Roams Siberian Wilderness To Find Frozen Lakes Bubbling With Methane - CC Times

CHERSKY, Russia — Sergei Zimov waded through knee-deep snow to reach a frozen lake where so much methane belches out of the melting permafrost that it spews out from the ice like small geysers.

In the frigid twilight, the Russian scientist struck a match to make a jet of the greenhouse gas visible. The sudden plume of fire threw him backward. Zimov stood up, brushed the snow off his parka and beamed. "Sometimes a big explosion happens, because the gas comes out like a bomb," Zimov said. "There are a million lakes like this in northern Siberia."

In a country where many scientists scoff at the existence of global warming, Zimov has been waging a lonely campaign to warn the world about Russia's melting permafrost and its nexus with climate change. His laboratory is the vast expanse of tundra and larch forest along the East Siberian Sea, an icy corner of the world that Zimov has scrutinized almost entirely on his own for 28 years.

Far from the archetypal scientist, the beefy, 53-year-old Russian with a mound of gray-brown hair and piercing blue eyes reigns over his patch of Siberia not with pipette and beaker, but with the swagger of a Cossack and an encyclopedic knowledge of his surroundings.

EDIT

http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_9153032?source=rss

something wicked this way comes.

Faster than expected? YOU make the call!!!

well, not exactly....


UAF researcher Katey Walter lights a pocket of methane on a thermokarst lake in Siberia in March of 2007. Igniting the gas is a way to demonstrate, in the field, that it contains methane.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071025174618.htm

its like our ears are pricked, waiting ...

The melting of permafrost cannot be stopped, Zimov says, but it could be slowed.

Not far from the research station is a 40,000-acre tract of wilderness that Zimov believes could one day turn the tide against permafrost thaw. He calls it Pleistocene Park, after the Ice Age epoch when mammoths roamed Siberia.

Zimov is reintroducing the grasses and herbivores that dominated northern Siberian steppes 10,000 years ago, and he plans to bulldoze portions of the park's larch forest and shrubland. Foxtail and cotton grass are taking root, providing fodder for herds of Yakutian horses, reindeer, musk oxen and bison Zimov envisions on the park's flatlands.

Steppe terrain inhibits permafrost thaw because it retains less heat than forests and lakes, and because grass-eating mammals pack down the snow as they graze, lessening the snow's ability to insulate the soil and keep it warmer.

It's nothing less than the creation of a new ecosystem, a daunting task aimed at building a bulwark against global warming. It will take years before the park's herds are large enough to make a discernible difference. But Zimov hopes the park serves as a template for similar efforts across Siberia's warming permafrost.

"The key is to show progress here, and show it quickly," Zimov says. "It's a very good idea and a very serious idea. It's not about how many fingers does a beetle have."

I hope he gets somewhere with those theories.

It's not so much introducing a whole new ecosystem as reintroducing an older one. Good idea.

If Humans disappeared from the planet tomorrow, the earth may still undergo drastic climate change over the next 10 to 20 years.

And all we talk about is capping the INCREASE in the release of CO2.

Without Active atmosphere reconstruction we are fucked. And I mean fucked because THAT is exactly what I worried about with the potential loss of the polar ice (Ice Reflects a good deal of energy) and that is already starting.

10 years of temps stabilizing is not going to cut it anymore. When it returns its going to be unstoppable with out massive effort.

10 years is barely enough time to get a few stations online.

Perhaps a program is needed to burn off as much of it as we can? Just pay people to throw flares into these holes and then collect the resulting Co2 with the worldwide active stations later?

Methane is about 64 times as effective at trapping atmospheric heat than carbon dioxide. That is to say, one ppm of methane in the atmosphere has the global warming effect as 64 ppm of CO2. Scientists believe that the outgassing of methane "ice" (methane clathrate) was responsible for the so-called Great Dying of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, which killed off 96% of all aquatic animals, 70% of all terrestrial animals and the only known mass extinction of insects.

In short, this is bad. This is very bad.

Which is still plenty grim.

inevitable. People will die by the millions of hunger and thirst and water wars.

Many of us here have come to the conclusion that the global population will likely fall to 1 billion by 2100. Many billions of people won't be crossing that finish line.

like rats and insects.

I listened to a report on Nat. Public Radio last fall about a researcher exploring lakes with this very same phenomena going on.

The entire Northern Hemisphere is destabilizing before our eyes.

But it still gives me shivers to know it's here.

The economists will save us. I'm sure the deep thinkers at the University of Chicago are working the problem this very moment. If only Alan Greenspan were still alive.

Unless I missed something...

Perhaps thou thinkith of Milton Friedman??

I'll be curled up in bed listening to Modest Mouse for the next six months. :P

but is it possible to capture this methane and use it's energy? What is the energy output of burned methane? Is it also a cabon based fuel?

the release is distributed all over the arctic regions of the northern hemisphere. It's not something that you could capture in useful quantities, short of our running joke of covering the entire northern hemisphere in saran wrap.

It's kind of a worst case scenario. Lots of released methane, but too distributed to do much about it. And it's 25x stronger as a greenhouse gas than CO2.