The newfound methane cache is nearly 5,000 miles long and stretches from Hawaii to Guatemala . Photo: Shutterstock
Researchers from Queen Mary College Londonrecently made a pretty big announcement: they found the largest marine methane deposit in the world. Stretching from Guatemala’s west coast across the Pacific to the Hawaiian Island chain, it’s absolutely huge–around 5,000 miles long. While it’s an interesting find, it’s not necessarily a good one.
About 60 million years ago, our Earth started doing something strange. Over the course of about 20,000 years–a blink in geologic history–it heated up by around 15º F. Researchers coined it the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (let’s just call it PETM, because I don’t feel like typing that more than once), and decided that vast deposits of methane escaping into the atmosphere were at least partially to blame. It lasted for nearly 200,000 years, and global temperature averages were 5-8º C warmer than present day. It was a strange time, and since the late ’90s, scientists have been studying it because it’s the closest thing we have to our current changing climate. A lot of the same things that went on back then are going on today: Ocean acidification, huge, quick outputs of carbon into the atmosphere, etc. The difference, though, is that this time the carbon is coming from us, and it’s happening much faster than it was back then. According to IFL.com, over the span of a century, the PETM’s warming rate came out to about .025ºC. Right now, we’re doing about 40 times that rate.
So what happened back then? Well, a lot. But here are the Cliffs Notes: the weather changed drastically, with way more precipitation, especially in warmer climates. The amount of Arctic ocean freshwater increased drastically as storms in the northern hemisphere dumped huge amounts of rain. The sea level rose dramatically, and over the course of a few thousand years, the ocean’s currents changed their patterns, affecting the weather even more. In some cases, currents that ran north-south turned entirely backward, taking warm surface water to deeper oceans, further affecting the climate and weather patterns. See, it’s all attached–the warmer it gets, the warmer it gets. That’s why this giant methane deposit is, to be honest, kind of scary.
“Although our own efforts to boil the planet are proving to be far more effective,” IFL’s Robin Andrews wrote, “any sudden methane release from the hydrosphere or cryosphere would give it a real shot in the arm – and the warmer the world gets, the more likely this is to happen.”
Source of enormous Pacific methane pool is found https://t.co/viyITKzBRH via @IBTimesUK
— Martha Henriques (@Martha_Rosamund) February 28, 2017
Although a lot of people now seem to think that a little climate change would be a good thing (“well dern, Cletus, it sure is cold today! Ma’s gout is acting up agin. Where’s this dern global warmin’ them science-folks are talkin’ ’bout?”), it most definitely is not. The PETM caused more than a few extinction events, and we’re not talking about a few little critters.
Most of the world’s methane is trapped in the permafrost in Siberia, North America, and deep under the ocean. There’s a lot coming out of cow’s butts, too (almost billion tons a year!), but that’s not dinner table talk. As the planet warms because of the ungodly amount of carbon we puke out every day, those permafrosts are melting, releasing more and more methane, which in turns warms the planet a little faster, which in turns melts a little more permafrost, and so on and so forth.
According to The International Business Times, “the bacteria that release vast pools of methane in the ocean have been found, clustered on a narrow ledge at the edge of an oceanic trench that stretches along the Americas. The bacteria are tiny and only found in a very restricted part of the zone, but the pools of methane they release are enormous. The location of the bacteria that release these plumes of methane has been elusive.”
Since the bacteria only works when there’s no oxygen, methane pools occur in dead zones, parts of the ocean that are deoxygenated. At the moment, those are confined to the middle-depths of the ocean, but this new find is worrisome because of climate researchers’ predictions.
“Scientists are predicting these low-oxygen zones will get larger and closer to the surface when the oceans warm,” said Felicity Shelley of the Queen Mary University of London. “This could increase the risk of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, being released to the atmosphere.”
This comes on the heels of a new study predicting mass extinctions by the end of the century. So, if all goes according to predictions, we’re pretty much screwed. Here’s hoping climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese!
