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