Melting of Greenland ice sheet could release methane ‘fire ice’

Meltwater flushed frozen methane hydrates out of the sediment on the fringe of the Greenland ice sheet after the final glacial most, which occurred 29,000 to 19,000 years in the past, elevating fears that melting glaciers may quickly launch large quantities of this planet-warming gasoline.

Methane hydrates kind when gasoline molecules are trapped in a cage of water molecules, freezing into an ice-like substance. They’re generally referred to as “fireplace ice” as a result of they’ll burn regardless of being 85 per cent water.

They kind below the excessive strain and low temperature present in sediments beneath the ocean, permafrost or glaciers. Some estimates counsel methane hydrates comprise twice as a lot carbon as all coal, oil and traditional gasoline on Earth.

However world warming is disrupting among the chilly, pressurised circumstances by which methane hydrates exist. For instance, some scientists suppose a mysterious 50-metre-deep crater found within the Russian Arctic in 2014 was induced when permafrost thaw out of the blue relieved the strain on a methane hydrate. This may have launched it in a “violent bodily explosion”, wrote the authors of a 2024 research.

Now, researchers have discovered that flows of glacial meltwater in Greenland may also unleash methane hydrates. “We discovered a brand new manner of releasing methane that we thought was within the financial institution,” says Mads Huuse on the College of Manchester, UK, who led the analysis. “It’s methane we thought was steady.”

Huuse and his colleagues knew methane hydrates had been frequent within the areas between grains of sediment on the backside of Melville Bay in north-western Greenland. In seismic surveys carried out by oil and gasoline corporations in 2011 and 2013, they seen 50 giant pockmarks within the seafloor, every as much as 37 metres deep, clustered close to an extended berm of earth referred to as a grounding zone wedge. Over the last glacial most, this wedge was the place the floating tongue of the ice sheet met the ocean backside.

The researchers initially thought the pockmarks had been scoured by overturning icebergs. However after they drilled sediment cores within the space, they discovered the highest layers of sediment had been largely freed from methane, although the temperature and strain had been excellent for methane hydrates.

Additionally they discovered giant volumes of contemporary water within the sediments, relatively than the seawater they anticipated. This might solely have come from ice sheet soften. The group thinks that over the past glacial most, meltwater flowing below the glaciers in Melville Bay was pressured via the grounding zone wedge, flushing out the methane hydrates.

Sooner or later, meltwater may wash out hydrates on the edges of different glaciers as they retreat below local weather change, says Huuse. Comparable grounding zone wedges exist throughout the Arctic.

“Within the not-so-distant previous – could possibly be 12,000, could possibly be 15,000 years in the past – a considerable amount of methane was launched, and that very same factor may occur tomorrow or within the subsequent century, principally, of receding ice sheets,” he says. “And that’s dangerous information, as a result of it’s not one thing we’d thought of earlier than.”

The analysis didn’t embrace an estimate of how a lot methane was launched in Melville Bay, however Huuse figures it may have been on the order of 130 million tonnes. That’s the equal of about two years of fossil gas emissions from the US, though he notes this methane may have been launched over the course of a century, relatively than a yr or two, and it was a one-time emission.

As well as, the methane would have been dissolved in seawater and, relying on the saturation, it might not all have been emitted to the environment, he says.

The Antarctic ice sheet in all probability sits on prime of much more methane hydrates than Greenland. The polar areas as an entire are estimated to carry wherever between 100 billion to 760 billion tonnes of methane in subglacial and marine hydrates. The discharge of even a fraction of that would rival the 48.7 million tonnes of methane at present launched by the Arctic and boreal biomes annually – largely from wetlands, lakes and streams – and pace up local weather change.

Methane is already being unlocked from below the Greenland ice sheet. A research revealed this month discovered meltwater streams throughout western Greenland are emitting an estimated 715 tonnes of methane per yr. Whereas a few of this could possibly be coming from hydrates, it’s extra more likely to come from historic plant carbon transformed to methane gasoline by micro organism below the ice, says Jade Hatton on the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, who led the research. This may in all probability enhance.

“If you happen to’re getting enhanced soften, you’re probably tapping into areas of subglacial system that… have gotten well-preserved natural carbon shares that then have the potential to be transformed into methane,” she says. “There may be the potential of comparatively giant future launch.”