Siberian Gas
Posted on 05. Mar, 2010 by Chuck Rocker in Dis & Dat, News, Tech
Global warming…again?
Yes. This time the source is a long-frozen seabed North of Siberia. Apparently its melting and releasing large amounts of greenhouse gas (methane) into the atmosphere. The study said about 8 million tonnes of methane a year, equivalent to the annual total previously estimated from all of the world’s oceans, were seeping from vast stores long trapped under permafrost below the seabed north of Russia. Remember when we used to blame “cows” for this problem?
“It’s good that these emissions are documented. But you cannot say they’re increasing,” Martin Heimann, an expert at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany who wrote a separate article on methane in Science, told Reuters.
“These leaks could have been occurring all the time” since the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, he said. He wrote that the release of 8 million tonnes of methane a year was “negligible” compared to global emissions of about 440 million tonnes.
