Researchers working in the Barents Sea have discovered hundreds of craters on the Arctic Sea floor, some measuring over a kilometer in width.

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These craters, which date back to the end of the last Ice Age, were formed when large reserves of methane exploded in the wake of retreating ice sheets. Because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, this discovery is a potential warning of things to come in our warming world.

Around 12, years ago, the Barents Sea—an area north of Scandinavia—was covered by a thick layer of ice. When the planet warmed and these ice sheets receded, enormous quantities of methane trapped below were abruptly released.

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The result was a series of explosive methane blowouts that littered the seafloor with craters. The details of this finding now appear in the latest edition of Science.

Today, these craters are still seeping methane, which is a concern to climate researchers. A colorless, odorless gas produced during microbial decomposition, methane is around 30 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Moreover, the same geological processes responsible for the historic methane blowouts are still happening elsewhere in the world today, leading to speculation that methane explosions could amp up due to human-caused climate change.

The Arctic seafloor hosts a tremendous amount of methane, which is trapped as hydrates—an ice-like solid mixture of gas and water.

Hydrates tend to be stable under high pressure and cold temperatures, and ice sheets offer an environment for subglacial gas hydrates to form. During the last Ice Age, a 1. Under this ice, methane from deeper hydrocarbon reservoirs creeped upward, but this gas could not escape into the atmosphere. All this methane was stored as hydrate within the sediment, creating over-pressurized conditions.

If you do not control the release of the pressure, it will continue to build up until there is a disaster in your kitchen. Bottoms up stock market mounds were over-pressured for thousands of years, pricing american options using lu decomposition then the lid came off.

They just collapsed releasing methane into the water column. The explosive release of methane gas from subglacial sediments produced massive craters on the seafloor. Hundreds of smaller craters measuring less than meters wide were also observed, and the researchers identified more than methane flares in-and-around the craters that are still spewing imf forex gas, though at rates far lower than what transpired during the explosive phase.

Some of these craters were identified in the s, but new scanning techniques allowed the researchers to survey the seafloor comprehensively. Speaking to Gizmodo, Andreassen said methane blowouts are the best explanation for the craters.

Importantly, Andreassen said similar blowouts could happen in the near future on account of climate change. Areas in front of retreating ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica could host underlying hydrocarbon reservoirs. Anyoption cedar binary options trading work is clearly needed to understand the nature and power of these historical blowouts, and to assess their environmental impacts.

The finding also points to the need to further study the potential reserves of hydrocarbons beneath the ice sheets of West Antarctica and Greenland. A recent deep …. Last year, scientists mapped one of the longest active methane seeps on the planet —a strip extending from British Columbia to Northern California. Scientists are only starting to get a grip on how much methane is escaping from the bowels of the planet, and how it might be influencing our climate.

Video Sploid Paleofuture io9 Science Reviews Field Guide. Hundreds of Giant Seafloor Craters Produced By Explosive Methane Farts. EARTH FARTS EARTH SCIENCES METHANE HYDRATES CLIMATE CHANGE GLOBAL WARMING ARCTIC SEAFLOOR CRATERS METHANE BLOW-OUTS GEOLOGY SCIENCE. Edit Promote Share to Kinja Toggle Conversation tools Go to permalink.

A recent deep … Read more. There Are Huge Plumes of Methane Leaking From the Atlantic Floor. There's an Enormous Natural Gas Seep Along the West Coast.

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