Storms, fire, drought and for anyone not convinced climate change is ugly, a lake in the Arctic is behaving as if possessed by the devil, Exorcist-style – gurgling, spitting and vomiting the flammable greenhouse gas methane into the air at such a rate that has left scientific minds boggled.
Scientists say it’s akin to a 6000 cows breaking wind, day after day.
Here is the much-repeated description of what’s happening in Lake Esieh, Alaska, from Washington Post reporter Chris Mooney who broke the story: “The lake, about 20 football fields in size, looked as if it was boiling. Its waters hissed, bubbled and popped as a powerful greenhouse gas escaped from the lake bed.
“Some bubbles grew as big as grapefruits, visibly lifting the water’s surface several inches and carrying up bits of mud from below.”
An underground storehouse unleashed
Most of the lake is reportedly a metre deep, but the spot where the gas is leaking from has dropped or been eaten away to a depth of 15 metres.
Some reports have suggested the massive blowout is a localised concentration of gases (carbon dioxide and methane) released by melting permafrost, which is suspected of causing massive sinkholes in Russia and is blamed for collapsing houses, warped roads and churned up cemeteries in Alaska.
But no. What’s happening in the lake is even worse.
Dr Katey Walter Anthony is an associate professor at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska. She has a research interest in Arctic lakes seeping methane – 300 studied so far – known as “thermokarst” lakes. She gained some celebrity by setting fishing holes in ice on fire to make a point about the dangers of melting permafrost.
Last hurrah for oil companies?
But at Lake Esieh, she found the chemical signature of the gas was of a geologic origin – meaning it wasn’t coming from thawing soil (which, among other things, releases long-buried microbes) but from fossil fuels being exposed to the atmosphere for the first time in thousands of years, maybe ever.
Gas and oil companies are already eyeing the Arctic as their last great hurrah, prospecting wise. But as Dr Walter Anthony told The Washington Post, if the reservoir of fossils fuels were but a sample of a greater store coming to light in the region, then the existential heat being felt by the planet so far would only intensify.
The warmer the world, then … the warmer the world. This is what scientists call a feedback loop.
In August, Dr Walter Anthony and colleagues published a paper in Nature Communications – based on model data, supported by field observations, radiocarbon dating, and remote sensing – that found permafrost carbon emissions are accelerated by abrupt thawing beneath lakes.
She also noted that most modelling of 21st century emissions haven’t taken lake emissions into account.
According to the Earth Institute at Columbia University, the world’s permafrost – which is 1500 metres thick in places – holds 1500 billion tons of carbon, almost double the amount of carbon that is currently in the atmosphere.
In June, the University of Colorado published a paper that found the US oil and gas industry emits 13 million metric tons of methane from its operations each year, 60 per cent more than estimated by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
