Posts Tagged ‘methane’

Permafrost retreats further north

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Buried in the ‘Weather Eye’ page of our paper of record again…

Climate change forcing frozen soil retreat

Mon, Feb 22, 2010

THE PERMANENTLY frozen ground known as permafrost is retreating northward in the area around Canada’s James Bay, a sign of a decades-long regional warming trend, a climate scientist has said.

When permafrost melts, it can liberate the powerful greenhouse gas methane that is locked in the frozen soil.

The amount of methane contained in permafrost around James Bay is slight compared to the vast stores of the chemical found in ancient, deep permafrost in the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia.

The southern edge of permafrost in the James Bay area has moved about 130km (80 miles) north of where it was 50 years ago, Serge Payette of Laval University in Quebec City said in a telephone interview. (more…)

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Posted in Global Warming | 2 Comments »

The Anthropocene draws to a close

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

The term Anthropocene was coined by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen a decade ago to describe the new ‘Era of Man’, a distinct geological epoch shaped almost entirely by our actions and impacts. “The Anthropocence has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest – and the last”, wrote Bob Holmes in the current edition of New Scientist in an intriguing article that rolls the clock forward to see how Earth would cope in the era after Man.

Mass extinctions are already well advanced, so much so that scientists have already designated the current era as the Sixth Extiction – since these measures cover close to a billion years, Extinction eras are rare indeed, the last being the event 65 million years ago that did for the dinosaurs and ultimately created the wiggle room for our ancient ancestors, the early mammals, to get a toe-hold. (more…)

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Posted in Global Warming, Habitat/species loss, Media, Sustainability | 4 Comments »

A time bomb in the wilderness

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

CO2, we’re told, is the knife at the throat of world climate. Methane has so far got much less press, mostly because there’s a lot less of it in the atmosphere. And just as well; methane is 23 times more potent in its greenhouse effect as the equivalent quantity of carbon, so even small quantities can mean big climate problems. (more…)

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Posted in Global Warming, Sustainability | 1 Comment »