The chart below shows that very high levels of methane have been recorded over Antarctica for some time now.These very high methane emissions occur on the heights of East Antarctica. The map below shows the highest altitudes on Antarctica colored red.
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| Antarctic map by the U.K.-based Centre for Polar Observation & Modelling (CPOM) |
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| Antarctic map showing the height of the ice sheet created with CryoSat-2 data |
Peter Carter, contributor to the Arctic-news blog, comments:
“This is of enormous planetary emergency significance because unlike the Arctic methane hydrate is the only possible source of this extraordinary emission of Antarctic methane.”
Albert Kallio, also contributor to the Arctic-news blog, comments:
“The Antarctic methane rise is an extremely worrying phenomenon. It can be caused by two processes. Neither a direct sunlight, nor atmospheric warming, can reach to the base of the ice sheet. However, it is still almost certainly to be a result of global warming – teleconnections – like other recent methane rises seen over the Arctic Ocean, Siberia and North American tundra:The graph below shows when glaciation and build-up of the ice sheet took place on Antarctica back in history.
(1) Theoretically, it could be a result of melt water percolation through Antarctic ice sheet to its base, and then, thawing the permafrost soil beneath the ice sheet.
(2) I suggest that methane is coming out from the Antarctic soils because of isostatic equilibrium change that has occurred between the weight loads levied by the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) and that of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).
While the East Antarctic ice accumulates weight, the West Antarctic ice loses its weight due to ablation (melting). As the fluids both in the asthenosphere and the crust are incompressible, the changing fluid pressure of one channels from one to the other via the subterranean fluid conduits. These can consist both hot magma and water which transports heat from deep towards the surface.
Asthenosphere is made of extremely water-soluble, but dense rock, Peridotite. If incursion of water from above gets into the peridotite, it hydrates and starts to melt. Hydrogen in water molecule tears molecules like NaCl apart to Na+ and Cl- as the bouncing water molecule swipes its two hydrogen tails in collisions with the other molecules. While NaCl is completely knocked down by water molecule’s hydrogen, in case of Peridotite molecules only some atomic parts are blown out, hence the process is called “partial melting”.
The First Nations UN General Assembly motion’s geophysical annotations attribute the onset of the Ice Ages completely for the continental plates drifting phenomenon. The continental plate drifting had caused crustal shearing at very high latitudes. The newly formed faults and the shearing of the continental plate then allowed water to reach Peridotite to liquefy it. This caused large lava floods onto sea floor boiling the ocean's water which then landed as snow.
My view is that Antarctica has developed now an adequate disequilibrium which pumps water into Peridotite, which then liquefies in the asthenosphere (and also in the crustal plate where there are Peridotite pockets within the Antarctic plate).
As a result of the ice sheet disequilibrium, some ice and water has forced their way into the Peridotite reservoirs, now liquefying it. This liquefaction allows heat to escape in the forms of heated water (a creation of subglacial geysers), or rock incursions such as lava floods and subglacial volcanoes that have started to develop beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The Gamburtsev Range is probably this kind of series of volcanoes and is a candidate for the EAIS methane.
As the heat starts rising more to the surface to (the base of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet), the ground warms and releases methane which is then dissolved into subglacial Antarctic water currents. (There are plenty of subglacial water currents and lakes to transport methane and dissolve it in water beneath Antarctic ice.)
The accumulation of water, pre-existing faults in bed rocks under the Antarctic ice sheet and local weight loads all determining where and when the methane starts oozing out once the ice sheet has now sufficiently changed from its multi-millennial equilibrium.”
The above graph also shows the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Wikipedia adds that due to the coarse sampling and averaging involved in this record, it is likely that the full magnitude of the PETM is underestimated by a factor of 2-4 times its apparent height. Temperature anomaly differences between geographic areas are also indicated on the map below, from the University of Texas Arlington Climate Research Group.
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| Geographical reconstruction for the PETM from the PALEOMAP Project (www.scotese.com) . Boxes indicate reconstructed surface temperature anomalies for the PETM relative to Paleocene background temperatures based on oxygen isotopes, Mg/Ca ratios and TEX86 (compiled by Appy Sluijs) |
- Methane hydrates on Antarctica formed after glaciation, making it likely that the quantity of methane on Antarctica today is higher than during the PETM. The role of methane hydrates in this event is further discussed in a number of papers, such as by Dickens and by Gu et al.
- Levels of all greenhouse gases (in particular methane) and other climate forcers (such as soot) in the atmosphere are already very high today and rising. The rate at which temperatures are rising today is extremely rapid, even compared with a peak such as the PETM, when global temperatures rose by about 6 °C (11 °F) over a period of approximately 20,000 years.
