Warming Arctic oceans could result in devastating methane release. US researchers now estimate climate change is accelerating the likely melt of frozen, deep-sea methane hydrates, leading to the potential discharge of an overwhelming 16,000 metric tons of methane annually.
Although the methane would initially be consumed by marine microbes, these would release CO2 with a resulting imbalance that could result in numerous dead zones, where the water would lose as much as 95% of its life-sustaining oxygen.
In addition, the microbial production of CO2 would increase ocean acidity, jeopardizing the survival of many species and disrupting marine ecosystems. As a further side effect, key nutrients such as nitrate, copper and iron that are useful to organisms would also be depleted due to the activity of the microbes.
Experts have detected large seafloor methane stores beneath waters throughout the Arctic as well as in the North Pacific Oceans, with some lakes and seas already showing the bubbling of methane plumes and similar microbial processes.
Study co-author Dr. Scott M. Elliot, a marine biogeochemist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA, stated, “This will be a truly big environmental pollution problem in the next few decades.
This problem is not going to go away.”
Our appreciation, Dr. Elliot and colleagues, for alerting us to this destructive scenario being formed beneath our oceans. Let us quickly adopt more sustainable lifestyles to avoid such dire outcomes to the planet.
During a September 2008 interview on the US-based Environmentally Sound Radio, Supreme Master Ching Hai addressed the threat of methane release in the context of global warming, while highlighting the way for human prevention.
Supreme Master Ching Hai: You look all that and you see already because the methane gas and hydrogen sulfide are resulted from animal raising, and that produces a lot of toxic gas into the air and it warms the atmosphere, and then the atmosphere melts the ice and the ocean will be warm, and then more methane and other toxins will be released from the bottom of the ocean and permafrost and all that. And then it will be like a devil’s circle. I hope we stop it quick.
If we do not do anything, then we will go to the point of no return. But luckily, because due to many new vegetarian people joining the vegetarian diet, now we have delayed the point of no return.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/60831/title/Methane_releases_in_arctic_seas_could_wreak_devastation Extra NewsAfter a million bats succumbed in the US to the disease known as white nose syndrome, the US Forest Service is asking for the cooperation of explorers to refrain from entering certain caves throughout five states to protect the bats and allow them to recover.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/us/28brfs-HUMANSBANNED_BRF.html?partner=rss&emc=rss http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/world/us-forest-service-closes-numerous-caves-closed-due-to-bat-fungus_100403528.htmlAs global warming causes rising seas to encroach further inland on the Carteret Islands, ruining crops and spoiling water supplies, former island resident Ms. Ursula Rakova forms the organization Tulele Peisa to raise funds for moving fellow islanders to Papua New Guinea.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/28/2967106.htm?section=justinAs a team of Kuwaiti divers works to remove several fishing nets, each 100 meters in length, from entanglement in coral reefs off the southern island of Garooh, they call for the use of such nets to cease for the protection of fragile marine life.
http://www.kuna.net.kw/NewsAgenciesPublicSite/ArticleDetails.aspx?Language=en&id=2102607 http://www.indiansinkuwait.com/ShowArticle.aspx?ID=6635&SECTION=0With crops threatened from receiving less than two inches of rain in the past five months compared to a normal average of 12, state climatologist Pao-Shin Chu of Hawaii, USA notes that global warming has caused increasingly higher temperatures with less and less rainfall over the last 50 years.
http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/Global/story.asp?S=12873276http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/hawaiinews/20100726_Dry_conditions_leave_isle_farms_parched.html
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