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Published online 3 December 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1275
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Methane bursts from frozen tundra
Ice build-up may squeeze greenhouse gas from cold soil.
As the autumn cold begins to bite in the Arctic tundra, the freezing ground releases a large and unexpected burst of methane into the air. The emissions, thought to be squeezed out by the growth of surface frost, match up with an atmospheric methane surge that had previously gone unexplained.
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Global Warming AND global cooling exacerbate the Greenhouse Effect! We should now be doing what we should have always been doing: nothing, performed at no cost to anybody.
Nice to see that some genuinely thorough science is replacing the guesses made in the computer modeling.
If I may react to the comment by A. Schwartz...if seasonal changes cause methane bursts and arctic climate warming also is predicted, by a different mechanism, to cause larger scale release of ground methane, this finding could only be cause for complacency if there were no arctic warming trend. The seasonal squeeze-out of gas would presumably continue to occur in any case, but the larger scale releases of methane predicted from warming of permafrost soils would only add to this annual gas-off. It all points to the need for more and better year-round Arctic research, like IPY.
Methane is now regularly measured by a satellite instrument AIRS/Aqua and the data are available for public at FTP anonymous site: acdisc.gsfc.nasa.gov /data/s4pa/Aqua_AIRS_Level3/AIRX3STD.005 (daily) /data/s4pa/Aqua_AIRS_Level3/AIRX3STM.005 (monthly) See an example of the most recent methane at my site http://www.geocities.com/leonidyurganov/MMM.htm These data confirm global increase, leading roles of the Northern Hemisphere, permafrost, Arctic ocean and winter sources.
The secondary September-October maximum of methane is observed at many areas of the Arctic by AIRS. E.g., in September in Greenland, Victoria, Banks; in October in Finland, Cola, Komi. But I disagree with the interpretation. We discussed this with Dr. M. Glagolev (MSU) and he proposed that in October deep unfrosen layers were still emitting methane, but surface frosen layer was unable to remove this methane.
It is not surprising that the winter methane burst was unnoticed until now. It is very difficult to keep CH4 measuring instruments working under real arctic winter conditions, this is the reason why the few stations that exist in the far north are shut down during the winter season. It really shows the need for better funding of ground-based research in the arctic.