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11/2022 Clathrate Bomb: Arctic could release a methane bomb resulting in swift human extinction

Updated: Nov 11, 2022

Know what is meant by "Clathrate Bomb" it is THE single largest threat to humanity and it is increasingly if not already entirely outside human control.


The threat posed by a clathrate bomb going off is arguably worse the nuclear war where at least a glimmer of human intervention might avert it.

2020-06-15 _F2A6553aaa


Sam Carana:


“HUMAN EXTINCTION BY 2022?


The October 2021 temperature anomaly shows that the Arctic is heating up enormously, with anomalies up to 9.1°C (first image).


The second image shows anomalies from 1900-1920. Globally, the temperature over the past century, i.e. from 1920 to 2020, has risen by 1.3°C. When adjusting data to reflect a pre-industrial base, ocean air (2m) temperatures and higher polar anomalies, temperatures may have crossed 2°C long ago.


The third image shows two trends, based on NASA 1880-October 2021 data, adjusted to reflect a pre-industrial base, ocean air (2m) temperatures and higher polar anomalies. The linear trend (green) misses the point that the temperature rise is accelerating. The polynomial trend (black) shows the potential for 3°C to be crossed by 2026.


Acceleration of the temperature rise may speed up further soon, for reasons including aerosols, sunspots and El Niño, further decline of Arctic snow and ice, seafloor methane and more.


There could be a rise from pre-industrial of more than 18°C by end 2026.


The image with the three trend shows the same black polynomial and green linear trends, based on NASA 1880-October 2021 data, as well as a blue polynomial trend based on 2015-October 2021 data. Data are again adjusted to reflect a pre-industrial base, ocean air (2m) temperatures and higher polar anomalies.


The blue polynomial trend better reflects short-term climate forcing such as from aerosols, sunspots and an upcoming El Niño. The blue trend also shows the potential for 3°C to be crossed by the end of 2022.


Huge amounts of heat are entering the Arctic Ocean, driven by ocean currents and temperature differences. Sea ice acts as a buffer, by consuming energy in the process of melting, thus avoiding that this energy can raise the temperature of the water of the Arctic Ocean. Furthermore, huge amounts of heat get transferred to the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean, as long as sea ice is low in extent.


The latent heat buffer has now virtually disappeared, while lower air temperatures are causing the sea ice to grow in extent, effectively sealing off the Arctic Ocean and reducing heat transfer from the Arctic Ocean to the atmosphere, as illustrated by the 30-day navy.mil animation (up to November 12, the last 8 days are forecasts).


Heat that was previously melting the ice or that was getting transferred to the atmosphere is now instead heating up the water. Some 75% of ESAS (East Siberian Arctic Shelf) is shallower than 50 m. Being shallow, these waters can easily warm up all the way down to the sea floor, where heat can penetrate cracks and conduits, destabilizing methane hydrates and sediments that were until now sealing off methane held in chambers in the form of free gas in these sediments.


Methane can then be released abruptly from the seabed in the form of plumes, causing it to rapidly pass through a shallow water column. Such plumes can quickly deplete oxygen in the water, making it harder for microbes to break down the methane. Where such plumes reach the atmosphere, they will also quickly deplete hydroxyl, which is present only in very low quantities in the Arctic in the first place.


Ominously, methane recently reached very high levels. As illustrated by the image below, the MetOp-B satellite (also known as MetOp-1) recorded a peak methane level of 3644 ppb and a mean level of 1944 ppb at 367 mb on November 21, 2021, pm.


Given that humans may go extinct with a 3°C rise, and a 5°C rise will likely end most life on Earth, the COP26 summit in Glasgow could have acted more decidedly.


From the post 'Human Extinction by 2022?', at:”


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“Nope, it's definitely from the sea floor. 16,000 years since it was as bad as it is TODAY. This will become known as a part of THE Clathrate Bomb. This is 100% settled in my mind. I simply lack the proof at this stage.


Nevertheless, I provide conjectural evidence below.

(A team of researchers from Belgium has identified important concentrations of methane in the surface waters of the North Sea, mainly near the Belgian and English coasts. In order to understand the origins of this methane concentration, it is necessary to go back 16,000 years in time when forests and peatlands connected England and Ireland to continental Europe. Trapped in marine sediment today, this organic matter produces methane which is easily released into the atmosphere from the shallower zones of the basin. This ground-breaking study includes the coastal regions in the quantification of the methane cycle. This quest was made even more difficult by the many sinks and sources of this hydrocarbon of both anthropogenic and natural origin. A better understanding of methane, the second most efficient greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide could be key to slowing down climate change.)”


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Phil Jefferson:


“Do you see that haze over the land? Its just a wintertime haze because its normal when it's Winter, right?

WRONG!

It's Methane, yeah, the planet heating odorless, tasteless, 84 times worse than CO² at heating the planet during its first 20 years after it's released, gas.

How do I know and why should you care?

I know because I study it and see the charts they use to measure it every day and I know.

It's part of the first 5% of the hundreds of billions of tonnes of it which have been locked in the ground and under the Arctic seas and within the melting Canadian and Siberian permafrost and it hasn't been released for tens of millions of years, maybe hundreds. Today, its spewing out, all over the planet at such a rapid rate that many people including myself believe that this relatively small amount will heat the planet so quickly that the added heat will cause what's known as the Clathrate Gun to fire. A methane bomb, releasing so much, in such a short rapid burst that we may have as little as 18 months until plants , animals and humans die off in quick succession and cause a chain of horrific events culminating in the extinction of most, if not all life on Earth within a mere decade, at best.

People should be made aware. We all need to wake from our temporary, materialistic, self centered, consumptive stupor and use the short time remaining wisely.

The end time is now.”


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Mark Trewick:


“OK. I'd like everyone to consider that what you're seeing in this screenshot I've grabbed from the CAMS atmospheric measurements website represents CH⁴ emissions not seen for over 16,000 years +. And that this marks part of the beginning of what we understand to be the imminent Clathrare Bomb or Gun hypothesis?


(A team of researchers from Belgium has identified important concentrations of methane in the surface waters of the North Sea, mainly near the Belgian and English coasts. In order to understand the origins of this methane concentration, it is necessary to go back 16,000 years in time when forests and peatlands connected England and Ireland to continental Europe. Trapped in marine sediment today, this organic matter produces methane which is easily released into the atmosphere from the shallower zones of the basin. This ground-breaking study includes the coastal regions in the quantification of the methane cycle. This quest was made even more difficult by the many sinks and sources of this hydrocarbon of both anthropogenic and natural origin. A better understanding of methane, the second most efficient greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide could be key to slowing down climate change.)”



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“A rapidly warming Arctic could loose a methane climate bomb resulting in extinction in nine years”


Larry Scrima:


April 28, 2018

· https://www.nationofchange.org/.../arcticseaicenews/2018/03/

a request to clarify (I am not an expert in this areaa) but here is an excerpt from the posted article article: "The latest, from a blog called Arctic News, warns that by 2026 – that’s just nine years from now – warming above the Arctic Circle could be so extreme that a massively disrupted and weakened jet stream could lead to global temperature rises so severe that a massive extinction event, including humans, could result.


This latest blog post, written by Arctic News editor Sam Carana, draws on research by a number of scientists (linked in his article), who report on various feedback loops that will result from a dramatically warmer north polar region. But the critical concern, he says, is methane already starting to be released in huge quantities from the shallow sea floor of the continental shelves north of Siberia and North America. That methane, produced by bacteria acting on biological material that sinks to the sea floor, for the most part, is currently lying frozen in a form of ice that is naturally created over millions of years by a mixing of methane and water, called a methane hydrate. Methane hydrate is a type of molecular structure called a clathrate. Clathrates are a kind of cage, in this case made of water ice, which traps another chemical, in this case methane. At normal temperatures, above the freezing temperature of water, these clathrates can only form under high pressures, such as a 50 meters or more under the ocean, and indeed such clathrates can be found under the sea floor even in places like the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where the temperature is 8-10 degrees above freezing. But in colder waters, they can exist and remain stable at much shallower levels, such as a in a few hundred feet of water off the coast of Alaska or Siberia.

The concern is that if the Arctic Ocean waters, particularly nearer to shore, were to warm even slightly, as they will do as the ice cap vanishes in summer and becomes much thinner in winter, at some point the clathrates there will suddenly dissolve releasing tens of thousands of gigatons of methane in huge bursts. Already, scientists are reporting that portions of the ocean, as well as shallow lakes in the far north, look as though they are boiling, as released methane bubbles to the surface, sometimes in such concentrations that they can be lit on fire with a match as they surface.


As Carana writes:


“As the temperature of the Arctic Ocean keeps rising, it seems inevitable that more and more methane will rise from its seafloor and enter the atmosphere, at first strongly warming up the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean itself – thus causing further methane eruptions – and eventually warming up the atmosphere across the globe.”


That is scary enough, as a sufficient burst of methane, a global warming gas 86 times more powerful than CO2, could lead to a rapid rise in global temperatures by 3 degrees Celsius or more, enough to actually reverse the carbon cycle, so that plants would end up releasing more carbon into the atmosphere rather than absorbing it.


Is this scenario or a giant methane “burp” from the Arctic sea floor just a scare story?

Not according to many scientists who study the earth’s long history of global warming periods and of evolution and periodic mass extinction events.


As Harold Wanless, a Professor of Geology and a specialist in sea level rise at the University of Miami explains, prior warming periods have often proceeded in dramatic pulses, not smoothly over drawn-out periods.


“We don’t know how this period of warming is going to develop,” he said. “That’s the problem.

The warming Arctic Ocean is just ice melting, but the melting permafrost in Siberia, and the methane hydrates under the shallow waters of the continental shelf can happen suddenly. Every model gets the trend, but they don’t give you the rate that it happens or when something sudden happens.”..."


“And they say I’m the crazy one!!

For that minority of us who reject both this Military Industrial Empire and its Two Party ‘One Party’ system, we are marginalized and ostracized.”


“2018: The year of Day Zero and the mega-drought

That drier (and warmer) future appears to be arriving much faster than expected for places like Cape Town and Phoenix. And yet business-as-usual seems to still be the order of the day.”



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