Teaching a course at College Nine, University of California Santa Cruz, and we are reading about global warming, and with the concurrent news, I just can't help but feel despair. An article from the Guardian on the Russian Arctic and the Laptev Sea (identified by the Guardian as "East" Siberia but it's all along the Arctic - i.e. northern - coast of Siberia, all seven or eight time zones of it). Huge amounts of methane appear to be in the process of being released. It is four to eight times higher than normal, bubbles coming up from the shallow sea which averages about 50 metres in depth, and over a vast area of hundred of kilometres. But there is much worse news further on in the article. The following long quote gives more detail:
"At one location on the Laptev Sea slope at a depth of about 300 metres they found methane concentrations of up to 1,600 nanomoles per litre, which is 400 times higher than would be expected if the sea and the atmosphere were in equilibrium.
Igor Semiletov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who is the chief scientist onboard, said the discharges were “significantly larger” than anything found before. “The discovery of actively releasing shelf slope hydrates is very important and unknown until now,” he said. “This is a new page. Potentially they can have serious climate consequences, but we need more study before we can confirm that.”
The most likely cause of the instability is an intrusion of warm Atlantic currents into the east Arctic. This “Atlantification” is driven by human-induced climate disruption."
I must confess that being somewhat illiterate in global sea dynamics, I would think that Pacific waters would be more likely to influence the eastern Arctic, but I guess that is the whole point: global warming is massively changing the dynamics of oceanic and meteorological circulation to the point that warmer Atlantic waters, maybe from the Gulf Stream, are now flowing through the Northwest Passage into the Arctic.
In any case, along with readings in class on the massive wildfires and deforestation of the Amazon, the release of zootropic viruses like COVID into human circulation, and other and sundry happy events, as depressing as 2020 has been, the future isn't looking a lot better.
"At one location on the Laptev Sea slope at a depth of about 300 metres they found methane concentrations of up to 1,600 nanomoles per litre, which is 400 times higher than would be expected if the sea and the atmosphere were in equilibrium.
Igor Semiletov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who is the chief scientist onboard, said the discharges were “significantly larger” than anything found before. “The discovery of actively releasing shelf slope hydrates is very important and unknown until now,” he said. “This is a new page. Potentially they can have serious climate consequences, but we need more study before we can confirm that.”
The most likely cause of the instability is an intrusion of warm Atlantic currents into the east Arctic. This “Atlantification” is driven by human-induced climate disruption."
I must confess that being somewhat illiterate in global sea dynamics, I would think that Pacific waters would be more likely to influence the eastern Arctic, but I guess that is the whole point: global warming is massively changing the dynamics of oceanic and meteorological circulation to the point that warmer Atlantic waters, maybe from the Gulf Stream, are now flowing through the Northwest Passage into the Arctic.
In any case, along with readings in class on the massive wildfires and deforestation of the Amazon, the release of zootropic viruses like COVID into human circulation, and other and sundry happy events, as depressing as 2020 has been, the future isn't looking a lot better.
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