A recent study published in Science shows that melting permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is starting to release methane gas from a vast store from the seafloor.  The “greenhouse effect” from methane is 30 times greater than that from carbon dioxide.  As the earth continues to warm, the permafrost will continue to destabilize, releasing more and more methane.

“It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen,” Shakhova said. “Nobody considered this huge area.”

“This study is a testament to sustained, careful observations and to international cooperation in research,” said Henrietta Edmonds of the National Science Foundation, which partially funded the study. “The Arctic is a difficult place to get to and to work in, but it is important that we do so in order to understand its role in global climate and its response and contribution to ongoing environmental change. It is important to understand the size of the reservoir–the amount of trapped methane that potentially could be released–as well as the processes that have kept it “trapped” and those that control the release. Work like this helps us to understand and document these processes.”

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“The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to 3 to 4 times,” Shakhova said. “The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict.”

Shakhova, Semiletov and collaborators from 12 institutions in five countries plan to continue their studies in the region, tracking the source of the methane emissions and drilling into the seafloor in an effort to estimate how much methane is stored there.

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