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Jamais Cascio weighs in on the encroaching problem of methane leaking out from under the Arctic permafrost. Sounds scary… BUT THEN, I first heard of this in the context of a potential energy source. Apparently there’s enough methane under the Arctic permafrost to keep civilization going indefinitely. Iiiiiinteresting… any thoughts, oh readers?

A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there’s a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There’s as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.

Here’s why: methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, significantly more powerful than carbon dioxide. There are billions of tons of methane trapped under the permafrost, and if that methane starts leaking quickly, it would have a strong feedback effect—warming the atmosphere and oceans, causing more methane to leak, and on and on. The melting of methane ice (aka “methane hydrates” and “methane clathrates”) is probably the most significant global warming tipping point event out there. If we see runaway methane from underneath the Siberian permafrost, we could see temperatures increasing far faster than even the most pessimistic CO2-driven scenarios—perhaps as much as 8-10° C, very much into the global catastrophe realm. To put it in context: rapid methane releases have been implicated in extinction events in Earth’s geologic past.

(Here’s one piece of mitigating information: it’s unclear how long this methane leak has been happening, or the degree to which the measured methane levels exceeds previous amounts. If we’re lucky, this is actually a status quo situation, and we still have time before we reach a tipping point. But basing our strategy on “if we’re lucky” is not very wise.)

(Open the Future: Pushing Back Against the Methane Tipping Point)