You may recall back in mid-September I reported that the annual arctic sea ice minimum for this
year was the second lowest on record and only the second time in recent history
that the total surface area had dropped below four million square kilometers the main thrust of that
program was that this kind of low sea ice cover is really quite bad news for the arctic and every
species on the planet if you're not sure what I'm on about then click up there to jump back
and have a look at that video generally though as soon as that minimum is reached each year
the change in the season very quickly brings much colder temperatures to the arctic region that
begin to rapidly restore the ice cover towards the winter maximum but this year was different this
year the ice didn't start coming back in September as quickly as expected and by Mid-October there
was less sea ice cover than any other previous year including the record low minimum of 2012.
that shortfall got scientists crawling all over the data and all over the arctic ocean trying to
work out exactly what was going on they realized that for various reasons not least the record
Siberian heatwave this summer the region of the arctic ocean that usually kicks off the growth of
new ice an area called the Laptev sea just off the coast of Siberia was experiencing abnormally high
temperatures well above freezing point and those high temperatures were inhibiting the formation
of new ice but that wasn't all they discovered as they went deeper and deeper below the surface
down to depths of about 350 meters they ran into huge plumes of bubbles rising up from the seabed
those bubbles were methane gas escaping from melting permafrost and the concentrations
were found to be 400 times higher than had previously been expected and that is a problem
hello and welcome to just have a think quick recap on why methane is a bad idea yeah why not earth's
average temperature has been remarkably stable since the end of the last ice age about 10 000
years ago and that's because until very recently the planet radiated pretty much the same amount
of heat out into space as it received from the sun each day the sunlight that warms us up is the bit
in the very short ultraviolet wavelengths and the bit that bounces back into space is in the very
long infrared wavelengths greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide have molecular structures that just
happen to interact perfectly with light in the infrared wavelength they literally absorb a photon
of infrared light and use that energy to vibrate their atoms in the case of CO2 it's the two oxygen
atoms either side of the carbon atom that do the vibrating while it's in this excited state
it's more likely to bump into the other molecules in the air like nitrogen and oxygen
and transfer a bit of its energy to them which heats those molecules up a tiny bit
eventually when the vibrating settles down the photon of infrared light gets released but there's
no guarantee which direction it'll be released in it might get fired upwards back into space
or it might get sent back down to earth and that greenhouse gas interaction with infrared light
is why our atmosphere is getting warmer a methane molecule is one carbon and four hydrogen atoms
and those four hydrogen atoms can vibrate in all sorts of different combinations and for reasons
that involve proper scientists and lectures featuring wavelength absorption charts like
these that means that over a 20-year time scale methane is 84 times more effective at trapping
heat than CO2 the only slightly good news is that methane breaks down much more quickly than carbon
dioxide so its effects are much more short-lived over a 100 year time scale it's only about
28 times more potent than CO2 so what we don't want is a bunch of methane in the atmosphere
right now there's just under 1900 parts per billion up there which doesn't sound like a lot
but that's up from 722 parts per billion in pre-industrial times so it's definitely going in
the wrong direction and that brings us back to the arctic and permafrost this fantastic interactive
site created by some extremely talented people at the Reuters news agency explains the various
ways that permafrost was created and how it's being affected by global warming I'll leave a
link to the site down in the description box below this video and I'd highly recommend you
take a closer look it's based on scientific data from a range of very reputable research papers all
translated into everyday language that you and I can get our heads around they show us
this view of earth looking straight down onto the north pole about two-thirds of the circumference
is basically Canada Alaska and Russia and then they show us where all the permafrost is found
it's a lot isn't it in fact no less than 25 percent of the entire northern hemisphere
is covered by permafrost and just to really cheer you up there's more than three times as
much carbon locked up in permafrost as there is in all the trees on the planet most of it
sadly is melting to a greater or lesser extent and that's already causing structural problems in many
areas because permanently frozen ground has always been a rock-solid substrate to fix foundations too
so of course we built lots of infrastructure directly on top of it according to a 2018 study
in nature 69 percent of all arctic infrastructure could be at risk of damage by mid-century
due to thawing permafrost and those areas have more than 3.6 million inhabitants
but it's the permafrost underwater over here in the Laptev sea and the East Siberian Arctic
shelf that's really got the scientists spooked the methane down here comes in the form of hydrates
because you know it's underwater I looked at the science of methane hydrates in an earlier video so
if you're keen to get a fuller understanding of how the process of formation and disintegration
of sub-sea permafrost works then you can click up there somewhere to jump back to that program
suffice to say if the water surrounding permafrost stays consistently above freezing for any length
of time then that permafrost is going to get significantly less frosty if you know what I mean
and when the permafrost wakes up all the tiny little microbes wake up too
and they start feasting on the now chewable organic matter that's thawing out in the
warming earth and that process mainly happens in the absence of oxygen and just like the anaerobic
digester at your local waste disposal center the byproduct is methane gas and make no mistake this
is a big deal the United States Geological Survey themselves list arctic hydrate destabilization
as one of the four most serious scenarios for climate change these latest findings come from a
scientific research team called the International Shelf Study expedition the 60 strong team aboard
the Russian research ship academic Kaldish reckon they're the first scientific research
group to observationally confirm the release of methane gas across a wide area of the arctic shelf
at six monitoring points over a slope area 150 kilometers long and 10 kilometers wide they saw
clouds of bubbles released from sediment normally when methane hydrates get released from the bottom
of the ocean they get dissolved in the deep waters before they reach the surface and that's certainly
happening in this case too but the concentrations are now so high that a really significant amount
of gas is still reaching the surface and venting up into the atmosphere the research team are
regularly measuring surface concentrations up to eight times higher than normal
and the water isn't 350 meters deep across that whole area either as you get onto the main part
of the East Siberian Arctic shelf the water can be as shallow as 50 meters the expedition's chief
scientist Igor Similitov said that for the second year in a row they found crater-like pock marks
in the shallower parts of the Laptev Sea and East Siberian sea that are discharging bubble jets of
methane which are reaching the surface at levels tens to hundreds of times higher than normal
there's estimated to be around 1400 billion tons of carbon locked up in subsea hydrates
some projections suggest there's a risk of a sudden and catastrophic release of something
like 50 billion tons of methane that could add as much as 0.6 degrees Celsius of warming to the
average global atmospheric temperature within just a few months and when we've seen the impact that
just one degree Celsius of temperature rise over the course of a century has caused to our weather
patterns adding another 0.6 degrees in less than a single year would obviously be pretty dramatic
and possibly existentially threatening for most large species on the planet including humans
it's important not to get too carried away with hypothetical hyperbole though Orjan Gustafsson a
swedish scientist taking part in the expedition said at this moment there is unlikely to be any
major impact on global warming but the point is that this process has now been triggered
this East Siberian slope methane hydrate system has been perturbed and the process will be ongoing
the teams still need to get all their data and samples back to dry land so they can conduct
properly controlled analysis and publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals but there's
no doubt that these preliminary findings represent a very worrying trend with serious potential to
accelerate the warming of our atmosphere as the arctic sea ice cover dwindles more warm water
is seeping into the arctic ocean in a kind of pincer movement from the atlantic on one side
and the pacific on the other the entire arctic region is warming as much as three times faster
than anywhere else on the planet siberia was five degrees Celsius warmer than normal
between January and June this year causing the same kinds of collapsing permafrost craters that
the expedition team witnessed under the Laptev Sea all these things are positive feedback loops that
reinforce each other and continue to increase the rate of warming not just in the arctic but across
the planet at the time of making this video in mid-November 2020 the autumn arctic temperatures
are finally kicking in and the sea ice is rapidly returning forcing the Russian research ship out
of the region and back to base so we should be getting published data at some point in 2021
but the scientists on that boat are in no doubt that the geological ecosystem at the top of the
world has reached yet another tipping point and the question is no longer if methane will
be released into our atmosphere in large volume but when now I know this is a subject that many
of you have very strong opinions on so do feel free to dive down to the comment section below
to leave your thoughts there and in keeping with the philosophy of the newly elected
United States president let's try and aim for a civilized and constructive exchange of views
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