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Methane is bubbling out of the bottoms of Arctic lakes, to the extent that, if you put a match to the surface of one of them, they catch on FIRE.

Some of it seems to be coming–not from the bottom mud–but from deeper geologic reservoirs that contain hundreds of times more methane than is in the atmosphere now. Due to Arctic melt, this methane–which has been safely secured by a covering of permafrost in the past, is now bubbling up to the surface, leaving open holes big enough to be seen from an airplane.
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Permafrost is thawing all over the planet, and this releases the powerful greenhouse gas methane. Permafrost covers nearly a quarter of the northern hemisphere and may contain as much as 1,700 gigatons of carbon, which is twice the amount that is currently in the atmosphere. As it thaws, it could push global warming past one of the key "tipping points" that scientists believe could lead to runaway climate change.
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In 1999 Whitley Strieber and Art Bell predicted that events like this were going to happen if we ignored the reality of climate change. A changing Gulf Stream off the East Coast has destabilized frozen methane deposits trapped under nearly 4,000 square miles of the seafloor, and since methane is even more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, any large-scale release like this could have a major impact on the climate.
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The Antarctic Ice Sheet may be a major source of the potent greenhouse gas methane. Old organic matter frozen beneath it may have been converted to methane by micro-organisms living there under oxygen-deprived conditions, and as the ice melts, the methane will be released.

Planetary scientist Slawek Tulaczyk says, "It is easy to forget that before 35 million years ago, when the current period of Antarctic glaciations started, this continent was teeming with life. Some of the organic material produced by this life became trapped in sediments, which then were cut off from the rest of the world when the ice sheet grew. Our modeling shows that over millions of years, microbes may have turned this old organic carbon into methane."
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