( ANSA) - LONDON - Millions of tons of methane - a gas 20 times more 'damaging than carbon dioxide for its contribution to the greenhouse effect - are preparing to 'explode' in the atmosphere, threatening to cause an ecological disaster. And 'that the alarm raised in the pages of the Independent today. The British newspaper 'was the first to talk to scientists who have collected evidence that the melting of glaciers and permafrost in the Arctic region is allowing the huge deposits of methane gas below the free atmosphere, repeating the dynamic that already' in the past had caused dramatic changes in climate.
According to the newspaper today, a team of scientists who sailed along the entire northern coast of Russia has found extremely high concentrations (sometimes 100 times higher than normal levels) of methane in several areas of several thousand square miles of Siberia. In recent days, moreover, the researchers saw the sea boil because of the gas and 'managed to cross the submarine permafrost layer, now in the process of dissolution. In''We have previously documented high levels of methane already 'dissolved in water. Yesterday, for the first time, we found a point where the emission of methane was so 'intense that the gas did not have time to dissolve in the water and came to the surface in the form of bubbles,''he wrote a few days ago in an email Orjan Gustafsson, one of the scholars of the scientific expedition aboard the Russian ship 'Jacob Smirnitskyi'. As recorded by scholars was the beginning of a devastating cycle: the escape of methane exponentially accelerate global warming in turn causing the melting of permafrost and thus freeing up other more methane into the atmosphere again, with the result of a trigger mechanism unstoppable.
Preliminary results collected by scientists on board the 'Jacob Smirnitskyi' will be published by the American Geophysical Union status after being processed and studied by Igor Semiletov Russian Academy of Sciences. E 'from 1994 Semiletov controls the levels of methane coming out of the permafrost, but while in the nineties had never detected high levels of gas, starting in 2003 found several sources''.'' In recent decades, the temperature of the Arctic and 'increased by around 4 degrees Celsius, decreasing considerably in the extent of the areas covered by ice during the summer. Scientists estimate that the loss of the ice sheet is a further push for a global warming more and more 'fast, since the ocean absorbs more' how much heat is reflected from the ice surface. (ANSA). 23/09/2008 17:14 |
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