Lots of interesting methane papers this week. In Nature Geoscience, Shakhova et al (2013) have published a substantial new study of the methane cycle on the Siberian continental margin of the Arctic Ocean. This paper will get a lot of attention, because it follows by a few months a paper from last summer, Whiteman et al (2013), which claimed a strong (and expensive) potential impact from Arctic methane on near-term climate evolution. That economic modeling study was based on an Arctic methane release scenario proposed in an earlier paper by Shakhova (2010). In PNAS, Miller et al (2013) find that the United States may be emitting 50-70% more methane than we thought. So where does this leave us?

The Context

Because methane is mostly well-mixed in the atmosphere, emissions from the Arctic or from the US must be seen within the context of the global sources of methane to the atmosphere. Estimates of methane emissions from the Arctic have risen, from land (Walter et al 2006) as well now as from the continental shelf off Siberia. Call it 20-30 Tg CH 4 per year from both sources. The US is apparently emitting more than we thought we were, maybe 30 Tg CH 4 per year. But these fluxes are relatively small compared to the global emission rate of about 600 Tg CH 4 per year. The Arctic and US anthropogenic are each about 5% of the total. Changes in the atmospheric concentration scale more-or-less with changes in the chronic emission flux, so unless these sources suddenly increase by an order of magnitude or more, they won’t dominate the atmospheric concentration of methane, or its climate impact.

American Methane Emissions Higher Than Previously Thought

Miller et al (2013) combine measurements of methane concentrations in various locations through time with model reconstructions of wind fields, and “invert” the information to estimate how much methane was released to the air as it blew over the land. This is a well-established methodology, pushed to constrain US anthropogenic emissions by including measurements from aircraft and communications towers in addition to the ever-invaluable NOAA flask sample network, and incorporating socioeconomic and industrial data. The US appears to be emitting 50-70% more methane than the EPA thought we were, based on “bottom up” accounting (adding up all the known sources).

Is this bad news for global warming?

Not really, because the one real hard fact that we know about atmospheric methane is that it’s concentration isn’t rising very quickly. Methane is a short-lived gas in the atmosphere, so to make it rise, the emission flux has to continually increase. This is in contrast to CO 2 , which accumulates in the atmosphere / ocean system, meaning that steady (non-rising) emissions still lead to a rising atmospheric concentration. There is enough uncertainty in the methane budget that tweaks of a few percent here and there don’t upset the apple cart. Since the methane concentration wasn’t rising all that much, its sources, uncertain as they are, have been mostly balanced by sinks, also uncertain. If anything, the paper is good news for people concerned about global warming, because it gives us something to fix.

Methane from the Siberian continental shelf

The Siberian continental shelf is huge, comprising about 20% of the global area of continental shelf. Sea level dropped during the last glacial maximum, but there was no ice sheet in Siberia, so the surface was exposed to the really cold atmosphere, and the ground froze to a depth of ~1.5 km. When sea level rose, the permafrost layer came under attack by the relatively warm ocean water. The submerged permafrost has been melting for millennia, but warming of the waters on the continental shelf could accelerate the melting. In equilibrium there should be no permafrost underneath the ocean, because the ocean is unfrozen, and the sediment gets warmer with depth below that (the geothermal temperature gradient).

Ingredients of Shakhova et al (2013)

There are lots of bubbles containing mostly methane coming up from the shallow sea floor in the East Siberian Arctic shelf. Bubbles like this have been seen elsewhere, off Spitzbergen for example ( Shakhova et al (2013) The bubbles mostly dissolve in the water column, but when the methane flux gets really high the bubbles rise faster and reach the atmosphere better. When methane dissolves in the water column, some of it escapes to the atmosphere by evaporation before it gets oxidized to CO 2 . Storms seem to pull methane out of the water column, enhancing what oceanographers call “gas exchange” by making waves with whitecaps. Melting sea ice will also increase methane escape to the atmosphere by gas exchange. However, the concentration of methane in the water column is low enough that even with storms the gas exchange flux seems like it must be negligible compared with the bubble flux. In their calculation of the methane flux to the atmosphere, Shakhova et al focused on bubbles. Sediments that got flooded by rising sea level thousands of years ago are warmer than sediments still exposed to the colder atmosphere, down to a depth of ~50 meters. This information is not directly applied to the question of incremental melting by warming waters in the short-term future. The study derives an estimate of a total methane emission rate from the East Siberian Arctic shelf area based on the statistics of a very large number of observed bubble seeps.

Is the methane flux from the Arctic accelerating?

Shakhova et al (2013) argue that bottom water temperatures are increasing more than had been recognized, in particular in near-coastal (shallow) waters. Sea ice cover has certainly been decreasing. These factors will no doubt lead to an increase in methane flux to the atmosphere, but the question is how strong this increase will be and how fast. I’m not aware of any direct observation of methane emission increase itself. The intensity of this response is pretty much the issue of the dispute about the Arctic methane bomb (below).

What about the extremely high methane concentrations measured in Arctic airmasses?

Shakhova et al (2013) show shipboard measurements of methane concentrations in the air above the ESAS that are almost twice as high as the global average (which is already twice as high as preindustrial). Aircraft measurements published last year also showed plumes of high methane concentration over the Arctic ocean (Kort et al 2012), especially in the surface boundary layer. It’s not easy to interpret boundary-layer methane concentrations quantitatively, however, because the concentration in that layer depends on the thickness of the boundary layer and how isolated it is from the air above it. Certainly high methane concentrations indicate emission fluxes, but it’s not straightforward to know how significant that flux is in the global budget.

The more easily interpretable measurement is the time-averaged difference between Northern and Southern hemisphere methane concentrations. If Arctic methane were driving a substantial increase in the global atmospheric methane concentration, it would be detectable in this time-mean interhemispheric gradient. Northern hemisphere concentrations are a bit higher than they are in the Southern hemisphere (here), but the magnitude of the difference is small enough to support the conclusion from the methane budget that tropical wetlands, which don’t generate much interhemispheric gradient, are a dominant natural source (Kirschke et al 2013).

What about methane hydrates?

There are three possible sources of the methane in the bubbles rising out of the Siberian margin continental shelf:

Decomposition (fermentation) of thawing organic carbon deposited with loess (windblown glacial flour) when the sediment was exposed to the atmosphere by low sea level during the last glacial time. Organic carbon deposits (called Yedoma) are the best-documented carbon reservoir in play in the Arctic. Methane gas that has been trapped by ice, now escaping. Shakhova et al (2013) Decomposition (melting) of methane hydrates, a peculiar form of water ice cages that form in the presence of, and trap, methane.

Methane hydrate seems menacing as a source of gas that can spring aggressively from the solid phase like pop rocks (carbonated candies). But hydrate doesn’t just explode as soon as it crosses a temperature boundary. It takes heat to convert hydrate into fluid + gas, what is called latent heat, just like regular water ice. There could be a lot of hydrate in Arctic sediments (it’s not real well known how much there is), but there is also lot of carbon as organic matter frozen in the permafrost. Their time scales for mobilization are not really all that different, so I personally don’t see hydrates as scarier than frozen organic matter. I think it just seems scarier.

The other thing about hydrate is that at any given temperature, a minimum pressure is required for hydrate to be stable. If there is pure gas phase present, the dissolved methane concentration in the pore water, from Henry’s law, scales with pressure. At 0 degrees C, you need a pressure equivalent to ~250 meters of water depth to get enough dissolved methane for hydrate to form.

The scariest parts of the Siberian margin are the shallow parts, because this is where methane bubbles from the sea floor might reach the surface, and this is where the warming trend is observed most strongly. But methane hydrate can only form hundreds of meters below the sea floor in that setting, so thermodynamically, hydrate is not expected to be found at or near the sea floor. (Methane hydrate can be found close to the sediment surface in deeper water depth settings, as for example in the Gulf of Mexico or the Nankai trough). The implication is that it will take centuries or longer before heat diffusion through that sediment column can reach and destabilize methane hydrates.

Is there any way nature might evade this thermodynamic imperative?

If hydrate exists in near-surface sediments of the Siberian margin, it would be called “metastable”. Metastability in nature is common when forming a new phase for which a “seed” or starting crystal is needed, like cloud droplets freezing in the upper atmosphere. But for decomposition to form water and gas one would not generally expect a barrier to just melting when energy is available. Chuvilin et al (2011) monitored melting hydrate in the laboratory and observed some quirkiness.

But these experiments spanned 100 hours, while the sediment column has been warming for thousands of years, so the experiments do not really address the question. I have to think that if there were some impervious-to-melting hydrate, why then would it suddenly melt, all at once, in a few years? Actual samples of hydrate collected from shallow sediments on the Siberian shelf would be much more convincing.

What about that Arctic methane bomb?

Shakhova et al (2013) did not find or claim to have found a 50 Gt C reservoir of methane ready to erupt in a few years. That claim, which is the basis of the Whiteman et al (2013) $60 trillion Arctic methane bomb paper, remains as unsubstantiated as ever. The Siberian Arctic, and the Americans, each emit a few percent of global emissions. Significant, but not bombs, more like large firecrackers.

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