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Comments 51 to 61 out of 61:

51. Leland Palmer at 16:56 PM on 23 August, 2014

    Hi scaddenp-

    Past recent glaciations, you mean. There are a series of mass extinction events associated with massive carbon isotope excursions, consistent with the release of trillions of tons of light carbon from the oceanic methane hydrates, if you go further back. And recent glaciations have arguably occurred more slowly and randomly than current warming, without the terrible speed, non-randomness and scale of our current fossil fuel emissions.

    You know, thanks for pointing out the immense probably thermogenic methane gas fields in that area of Siberia. Gazprom says that one field there, Zapolyarnoye, has about 3 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. Thats a little bigger than two gtons of methane, right there, compared to about 5 Gtons of methane in the atmosphere right now. Boy howdy, I hope hundreds of Yamal style craters don't start blowing the roof off of that gas field, in say 20 years, or 50 years!

    Zapolyarnoye

    Now that we know such cold gas eruptions like Yamal exist, we would be remiss in our duties as stewards of Earth if we didn't investigate that possibility, wouldn't we? As the permafrost melts, and weakens I hope gas pressure doesn't blow that those Gazprom gas wells out of those soils formerly known as permafrost.

    Looking at it in Google Earth, that area looks a little pockmarked, by the way, showing a landscape dotted with circular lakes, perhaps suggestive of past Yamal style gas eruptions plus subsidence.  There has been some water streambed erosion through there, though so it's hard to be sure. Gazprom says that this immensly productive field is in an area only 50 km long and 30 km wide, and they are annoyingly vague about its exact boundaries. If you know the exact boundaries of this field, that would be helpful.

    You've totally got the shoe on the wong foot, though, abut responsible action. Fear is a totally natural reaction to danger. I truly believe we are in a lot of danger, and it would be irresponsible not to investigate the Yamal cold eruption phenomenon. Given the apparent occurance of past methane catastrophes, we are in fact being remiss right now in not banning fossil fuel use, just on the chance that we might set one off.

    Personally, I think that we're going to see more of these Yamal cold gas eruptions. I think they're going to start popping like popcorn. I think we're going to see all sizes of them, many thousands of them, and some of the ones to come are going to make the current Yamal crater look very tiny, indeed. After they blow, I think we're likely to see large chronic emissions from some of them, and a repeated series of explosive eruptions from others. After we get thousands of them, the combined instantaneous and chronic eruptions will likely create a truly significant impact on global warming, I think, and may be large enough to start the widespread dissociation of the continental shelf methane hydrates.

    It would be irresponsible not to say this. I know that I have no bad motives in making these posts. I'm not motivated by profit, or greed, or glee at scaring people. I'm motivated by sincere concern, and a conviction that we are only seeing a tiny preview of coming attractions in these Yamal cold gas eruptions.

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52. Tom Curtis at 19:12 PM on 23 August, 2014

    Leland Palmer @51, you are motivated a firm belief that causes you to ignore all contrary evidence, and to seize upon any evidence that may trivially support your belief as proof of the belief's rationality.  Your approach, in other words, is that of pseudo-science, not sciene.  The primary effect of your approach to evidence, if persuasive to any, is to teach those who are persuaded that pseudoscience is "rational", thereby making them more vulnerable to the pseudoscience from AGW deniers.  In other words, you are a hindrance, not a help towards effective action on the real problems stemming from global warming.

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53. scaddenp at 21:16 PM on 23 August, 2014

    I'm with Tom. This is utterly irrational. As has repeatedly been pointed out to you, in deep geological time, the world was different with shallow seas and the possibility of much more methane hydrate. Pleistocene glaciations are with a world that is much like ours. 

    It doesnt actually matter how big those fields are because as has been also repeatedly pointed out to you, loss rates from gas fields are very slow and incapable of producing the dangerous amounts of methane. If you could leak gas fast there wouldnt be a gas field - their very existance implies tight deep seal rocks.

    You might see more subsidence etc from methane hydrate loss (a far more plausible explanation than frozen ground holding back a gas seep) but 20,000,000? or even 2,000,000? Anyway, russian scientists are investigating and we will await data with interest.

    Your sincere concern is noted but more attention to the science (and arithmetic) instead of uninformed alarmism would be nice. 

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54. Leland Palmer at 23:32 PM on 25 August, 2014

    OK, I was wrong, mea culpa.

    The vast majority of those circular landforms in Siberia are kettle lakes, left behind by the retreat of glaciers. There aren't thousands - there are millions - 300,000 on the Yamal Peninsula alone.

    So, yes, there are two processes that can leave circular holes operating simultaneously in the same area, and Occam's Razor works better with simple systems than with complex ones.

    But, just because I got excited and acted like an idiot doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist. We've still got cold eruption craters appearing in the same area, mixed in with hundreds of thousands of circular kettle lakes. 

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55. Tom Curtis at 00:49 AM on 26 August, 2014

    Leland Palmer @54:

    First, thankyou for acknowledging your error.

    Second, it would be nice if you linked to the source of the information that forms the basis of your claims.

    Third, I did find a comprehensive discussion of thermokarst lakes (including Kettle lakes) by Grosse, Jones and Arp (2013).  It turns out they can be formed by two known methods, to which it appears a third one can now be added.  The second of the known methods is from permafrost melt, and is explained in detail in Figure 7.  It is an ongoing process that has been observed, as has happened in Alaska (Fig 6).

    Fourth, drained thermokarst lakes have been dated using C14, and show ages from 5.5 thousand years ago up to the present.  Therefore the approximately 2 million thermokarst lakes worldwide have formed over that 5 thousand year interval, at an average rate of 400 per year.  Total thermokarst lake and pond surface area is estimated at between 250 and 380 thousand km^2, and hence with an average formation rate of 63 km^2 per year.   No doubt that rate is not even over time, but never-the-less this is obviously an ongoing process that has been part of the background cause of atmospheric methane for a long time, and has not caused any methane catastrophes in that period.  Further, ongoing formation of thermokarst lakes is budgetted into expected increaseses of methane emission with time under global warming (including those by Archer).

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    Moderator Response:

    [JH] Also see the NSF news release of July 16, 2014:

    Certain Arctic lakes store more greenhouse gases than they release

56. Leland Palmer at 14:56 PM on 26 August, 2014

    Tom Curtis and JH-

    I still wonder if I'm inhabiting the same planet with you guys, frankly. I'd be lying if I said any different. Yes, there are negative feedbacks going on, JH. We hear about the greening of the Arctic as a negative feedback, and that's great.

    But, the Yamal crater is located about 16 miles from  Bovanenkovo, one of the three largest natural gas deposits in the world. The latitude and longitude I got off the web for this crater is 70 28 42.8 N, 67 47 52.8 E.

    From Gazprom-

    "32 fields were discovered in the Yamal Peninsula and its offshore areas with the aggregate reserves (A + B + C1 + C2) and resources (C3) reaching 26.5 trillion cubic meters of gas and some 1.64 billion tons of oil and condensate. The Bovanenkovo field is the most significant one in Yamal as its (A + B + C1 + C2) gas reserves amount to 4.9 trillion cubic meters."

    4.9 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, located an average of 16 miles from the Yamal blowout, is more than three Gtons of methane, and is equal to roughly half of the methane in the atmosphere of the entire earth at this time.

    Another one of the three cold gas eruption craters we know about so far is located in the Taz district, and appears to be roughly 85 miles from Zapolyamoye, another giant gas field that contains about 2 Gtons of methane.

    The entire Yamal complex contains several times the amount of methane contained in the entire atmosphere of the earth. It's located under a kilometer or more of permafrost that has just barely started to thaw, and already we've got three cold gas eruption craters that we know about.

    I really do hope you guys are correct about how stable it all is. I find your calm and your confidence in scolarship and mathematics to keep us safe almost as unnerving as the eruptions themselves. I wonder if it is humanly possible to predict what will happen to such a complex system that is being affected so massively by global warming.

    Twenty six point five trillion tons of natural gas is worth about 10 trillion dollars, by the way. So, I really do wonder how that huge profit motive will affect the information coming out of Russia about these blowouts.

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57. Leland Palmer at 15:01 PM on 26 August, 2014

    Uh, make that twenty six point five trillion cubuc meters of natural gas, in the last paragraph, equal to about 10 trillion dollars, gross sales at European market prices.

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58. scaddenp at 15:22 PM on 26 August, 2014

    Leyland, the gas in those reservoirs was produced millions of years ago and the fact that it is still there tell you about the quality of gas seals immediately about the reservoir (at 2+ kms deep). Given the changes that reservoir has been through, a little bit of warming on top isnt going to magically change seal properties.

    Basically, in the planet I live in, you cannot get that methane out of those reservoirs into the atmosphere at a rate that would make much difference. If it was that easy, we wouldnt need all these highly paid reservoir engineers. I am also think it is extremely unlikely that the craters have anything to do with the gas reservoirs at all, and idea that gas could be leaking from those reservoirs over a wide area rather than on narrow fault zones is fantasyland as far as I am concerned.

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59. Tom Curtis at 23:52 PM on 26 August, 2014

    Leyland Palmer @56:

    1)  The gas horizons for two of the fields in the Yamal pensinsular are at 900 meters (for five), and 2,850 meters (for the other 37).  For two other fields (paywalled), the top horizon (of many) are at 1,200 meters, and 600 meters (the later being for the Bovanenkovo field).    I could find no reason to think these depths are not typical.  Scaddenp's estimate of an average depth greater than 2 km seems well born out.

    2)  The fact that just two smaller fields coul have the gas split among 42 distinct horizons shows that leakage of the gas is restricted, and the exception.  Were vertical leakage easy, the gas would leak away from all lower horizons and accumulate in just one or two shallow horizons (or dissipate entirely).

    3)  The Yamal peninsular has 26 different gas bearing fields.  Again, if lateral leakage was easy, these fields would conglomerate.  The fact that they remain distinct fields shows they are unlikely to leak.

    4)  Contrary to your claims, the permafrost at Yamal (and at Bovanenkovo in particular) extends only to 350 meters depth, and only to 160 meters depth at Bovanenkovo (see second link above).  That is, for even the shallowest gas horizon the topmost gas horizon has a depth 440 meters greater than the deepest permafrost.  The idea of global warming melting and hence weakening that 400 plus meter layer of non-permafrost is fanciful, to say the least.

    5)  High levels of methane gas in the permafrost of the Yamal peninsular has been known for some time, and thoroughly explored.  In particular, it has been determined by composition, and by C13 ratios that the gas is of biological origin and is not related to the underlying gas fields.  Please note, this is not speculation, but the result of observations over 30 cores drilled to depths 450 meters (ie, 290 meters beyond the lower limit of the permafrost) at the Bovanenkovo field to specifically explore how permafrost methane would impact on production drilling).

    6)  Those wells found gas releases that lasted "from several days to several months", so analogies with the "Door to Hell" are misleading.  Gas flow rates in a case described as the "most representative", initial flow rates of 3000 cubic meters per day fell by a third within two days, and to 1200 cubic meters per day after 10 days.   It continued falling thereafter so that by six months later it was down to 500 cubic meters per day.

    Even at the initial high flow rates, from 50,000 such "blowouts", the flow would need to be maintained for 90 years to release the equivalent amount of gas to that contained in the Bovanenkovo field.   At the more realistic long term flow rate  of 500 cubic meters per day, it would take  over 5 million such blowouts to release that quantity of gas in five years.  That is assuming, contrary to the evidence, that the flow rate was steady.  In fact it was continuing to decline.

    Even with that release, the radiative forcing from methane would increase by 0.2 W/m^2, compared to the current (2013) 1.8 W/m^2 radiative forcing from CO2.

    It is no wonder that one of the authors of the paper studying gass blowouts at Yamal joined with David Archer and many others in 2009 to write:

    "Holes in the ocean’s sediment surface (pockmarks) and submarine landslides are among the mechanisms of eruptive methane release as a result of hydrate estabilization. Quantities released in single events are constrained to about 1–5 GtC, resulting in increased radiative forcing of up to 0.2 Wm−2 if all the methane were to reach the atmosphere (Archer 2007). For comparison, the best estimate total change in radiative forcing from pre-industrial times until today is 1.6 Wm−2 (IPCC 2007b). Methane releases from hydrates that could be most significant to climate change are more likely to be of chronic nature."

    Again, Leland, you are manufacturing fears out of nothing.  The only sum that gives you cause for concern is the total mass of methane locked up in the north.  Even then, your figures (such as the total gas in the Bovanenkovo field) do not generate the types of radiative forcing that you fear.  More importantly, any time actual potential flow rates are quantified, it becomes clear that (as the leading experts repeatedly tell us), methane release in the north may well cause a chronic low grade increase in radiative forcing - but are highly unlikely to cause a sudden catastrophe. 

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60. John Hartz at 00:42 AM on 27 August, 2014

    @Leland Palmer: You are no longer skating on the thin ice of excessive repetition because you have fallen through it. If you do not cease and desist, you will forfeit your privilege of posting comments on this website. 

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61. Tom Curtis at 08:51 AM on 5 March, 2015

    John Baez has an interesting update on the Yamal craters.  Perhaps the most important new information is that some of the many circular craters on the Yamal peninsula are recent.  That has been determined by comparing satellite photos of the region.  Baez quotes extensively from an article, which says:

    "Professor Bogoyavlensky told The Siberian Times: ‘One of the most interesting objects here is the crater that we mark as B2, located 10 kilometres to the south of Bovanenkovo. On the satellite image you can see that it is one big lake surrounded by more than 20 small craters filled with water.

    "Studying the satellite images we found out that initially there were no craters nor a lake. Some craters appeared, then more. Then, I suppose that the craters filled with water and turned to several lakes, then merged into one large lake, 50 by 100 metres in diameter.

    ‘This big lake is surrounded by the network of more than 20 ‘baby’ craters now filled with water and I suppose that new ones could appear last summer or even now. We now counting them and making a catalogue. Some of them are very small, no more than 2 metres in diameter.’"

    This proves the formation of the craters has been an ongoing event over the last decade.  It follows that the current rate of increase in atmospheric methane already includes a contribution from the formation of yamal type craters.  The rate of formation could possibly accelerate with continued warming, but such an acceleration will result in an increase in the rate of methane increase rather than a sudden rapid rise (Shakhova event).

    Also of interest are anecdotal accounts of residents in the area seeing a flash at the time, and in the direction of the formation of one of the recent craters.  Such a flash would indicate the formation was literally explosive, with a significant proportion of the methane oxidizing when the crater was formed.  If true, that would indicate a far lower rate of methane release from these events than that estimated by David Archer at Real Climate.

    Finally, Baez links to an article by Chris Mooney assessing the risk of a methane lead disaster from such methane releases. 

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