There is not a consensus yet as to what is really happening in Siberia, but new data are being collected and the dots are starting to connect.
Using data from a ground-based climate observing station in Tiksi, a small town in the Sakha Republic on the Arctic Ocean coast, Dr Box discovered "high end" levels of methane. The readings were backed up by data from similar stations in Alaska and Canada, according to News.com.au.
The spikes, which Dr Box calls "dragon breaths", may well be connected to the unusual holes that have appeared in the Siberia landscape over the last month.
It appears that witnessing the formation of these craters can be rather frightening.
'Observers give several versions. According to the first, initially at the place was smoking, and then there was a bright flash.
And you better watch your step when you're wondering around out there.
The third crater and hole is in the Taymyr Peninsula and was accidentally discovered by reindeer herders who almost fell into it, in the vicinity of the remote outpost of Nosok.
The funnel is a perfectly formed cone, say locals who are mystified over its formation.
Its depth is estimated at between 200 to 330ft (60 to 100 metres) and its diameter - more than 13ft (four metres).
So we now have 3 craters in Siberia.
As
Robert Scribbler says on his blog.
A single event of this kind might be easy to overlook as an aberration. A freak case that might well be attributed to unique conditions. But over the past two weeks not one, not two, but three large holes, all retaining the same features, have appeared within the same region of Yamal, Russia.
A single event may well be easily marked off as a strange occurrence, but three look more like the start of a trend.
Dr. Box goes on to speculate that the release of methane from the ground and the oceans can change the effects of Global Warming very quickly.
"If we don't get atmospheric carbon down and cool the Arctic, the climate physics and recent observations tell me we will probably trigger the release of these vast carbon stores, dooming our kids to a hothouse Earth," Dr Box wrote.
Similarly to Siberia's craters, bubbles of methane have been recorded rising to the surface of the Arctic Ocean since 2011.
"Atmospheric methane release is a much bigger problem than atmospheric carbon dioxide release, since methane is around 20 times more powerful greenhouse gas," he added.
As the denialists continue to spew their pseudoscience nonsense, and as the fossil fuel industry puppets in congress continue to block anything that might secure a stable climate for our children's future, the dragons in the earth are beginning to roar.
UPDATE: An article was just published a few hours ago in Scientific American about this.
Still nowhere near a definitive answer, but some interesting speculation.
The crater's formation probably began in a similar way to that of a sinkhole, where water (in this case, melted ice or permafrost) collects in an underground cavity, Romanovsky said. But instead of the roof of the cavity collapsing, something different occurred. Pressure built up, possibly from natural gas (methane), eventually spewing out a slurry of dirt as the ground sunk away. Anna Kurchatova, a scientist at the Sub-Arctic Scientific Research Center in Russia, made a similar observation to The Siberian Times.
There are still a lot of scientists who are betting Pingo. I just like saying Pingo because it's such a cool term, so I'm going to use it as much as possible. :)
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