Melting Glacier
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Scientists have discovered that the same massive release of
methane into the atmosphere that caused sudden climate
change 14,000 years ago has already started to happen
again.
At that time, there was a sudden, devastating change in
earth?s climate. It took place when dramatic drops in
temperature followed an equally dramatic temperature spike.
Naturally occurring global warming had been taking place for
some time, when a massive release of methane into the
atmosphere sped the process up, causing a worldwide spike
in temperatures.
This caused a devastating acceleration in global warming,
triggering warming processes that melted most of earth's
polar ice and raised sea levels world-wide, engulfing coasts
and drowning islands. Art Bell and Whitley Strieber, in their
book the Coming Global Superstorm, identified this methane
release as one of the key triggers of the dramatic heating
that led to the subsequent climactic chaos that broke out
during that period.
Santo Bains of Oxford University?s Department of Earth
Sciences led a team of geologists through three years of
research in the badlands of Wyoming. They also took samples
from the ocean floors off Florida and Antarctica. Their study
confirms work by Russian, French and US scientists studying
ancient air bubbles trapped in Greenland and Antarctic ice-
cores. This data all show that global warming at the end of
the last Ice Age 14,000 years ago was also associated with a
huge and very rapid increase of methane into the atmosphere.
Methane retains far more heat in the atmosphere than does
carbon dioxide. Large amounts of methane are trapped in and
below the permafrost in the Arctic. Also, sediments in sea
beds worldwide contain vast quantities of methane hydrates
and trapped methane gas. Cold temperatures keep them
stable, but permafrost melt is already beginning to release
methane, and the hotter the arctic gets, the more methane
will enter the atmosphere.
This is the same process that took place 14,000 years ago.
In addition, as global warming raises sea levels, large areas of
Siberian and other permafrost areas will be flooded, releasing
yet more methane. Global warming will then become a self-
feeding cycle, unstoppable by any form of human intervention.
The major natural cause of massive methane escape comes
from buried ocean reserves. When underwater landslides
expose previously buried gas-bearing sediments, pressure is
reduced in an instant and the gas escapes into the
atmosphere. Scientists are only now beginning to realize that
global warming can increase the rate of these marine
landslides. Because global warming creates a warmer and
wetter world in which floods are more likely to occur, the
volume and flow of many rivers will increase, and increased
river flow creates larger expanses of methane-producing
swamps.
?The new evidence clearly shows methane was deeply
involved in the very rapid global warming at the end of the
ice age,? says Professor Euan Nisbet, of the University of
London. ?By studying that event, we may well be able to
understand the effect of future global warming on the Arctic.?
There is another major factor which has been left out of most
global warming predictions. Although most areas of the world
will become wetter as global warming continues, one key
area, the Amazon Basin, could become drier, according to a
British Meteorological Office study. As a result, the jungle
would be unable to survive and would begin to die. This would
accelerate global warming in two ways.
First, as the jungle dries up, it would become flammable and
vulnerable to massive forest fires caused by lightning. This
would release up to 150 billion tons of CO2 into the
atmosphere. Second, the destruction of the jungle and its
replacement by savanna grassland would reduce the planet's
ability to absorb CO2 more profoundly than scientists had
realized.
Four Brazilian biologists, led by Dr Antonio Nobre of Brazil's
National Institute for the Study of the Amazon, have made
the surprising discovery that the number of plants in the
Amazon jungle has been increasing in response to human CO2
emissions. Thus the Amazon is reducing the rate of global
warming much more than science realized. If the jungle
disappears?and climatologists warn that could happen
between 2050 and 2100?its disappearance would have an
even more bigger effect than we?ve planned for.
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