The warming spikes in the Arctic climate record scientists suggest are earthquake-related/Geosciences
A pair of Russian scientists have come up with a novel theory to explain a couple of odd spikes in rising Arctic temperatures over the course of the last 110 years: Ripples in the planet’s crust driven by massive earthquakes beneath the arc of the Aleutian Islands.
And no, Leopold Lobkovsky from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and P.P. Shirshov from the Institute of Oceanology with the Russian Academy of Sciences are not some oddball deniers of the belief that so-called “greenhouse gases” accumulating in the atmosphere are slowing the escape of solar radiation striking the third planet from the sun and thus making the earth warmer.
Their hypothesis, in fact, hinges on the escape of such gases into the atmosphere. The big difference is that the burst of gas they suggest is natural, not manmade.
Their theory is based on correlations between the quakes and subsequent spikes in Arctic temperatures. It is a given of science that correlations do not prove causation, but they are sometimes a starting point in the search for causes.
The Russian scientists point to a 20-year time lag between the big quakes and the big peaks in temperature, “which is explained by the time of arrival of deformation waves in the lithosphere (propagating with a velocity of about 100 kilometers per year) at the Arctic shelf and adjacent land from the Aleutian subduction zone, the region of their generation.”
An invisible ripple
This slow but steady deformation, they believe, frees methane from permafrost and drives the “destruction of micro-sized ice films covering gas hydrate particles, the elements highly important for hydrate self-preservation, as well as destruction of gas-saturated micropores in permafrost rocks due to the slight additional stresses associated with deformation waves, and thus emergence of conditions favorable for gas filtration and its subsequent emission.”
Gas hydrates are basically frozen blocks of methane gas. And methane is a well-known greenhouse gas created by the decay of organic materials.
As a heat-trapping gas, methane is judged to be about 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide (CO2) A byproduct of combustion, CO2 has been on the rise in the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The increase is clearly linked to an exploding population of humans burning fossil fuels to heat and power their lives. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution just before the start of the 1800s, there were fewer than a billion humans on the planet, according to Our World in Data, a website maintained by the University of Oxford.
Thanks to technological progress driven by the Industrial Revolution and agricultural progress powered by the Green Revolution that followed, the global population exploded. It is now approaching 8 billion.
Unfortunately, the progress that allowed so many more people to survive has come with problems: world wars, pollution, pandemics and manmade CO2 to name a few.
But the manmade greenhouse gas does not explain everything seen in the historic and prehistoric global temperature record as Lobkovsky and Shirshov note.
Complex picture
They make it clear in their paper that they do not believe “that the observed climate changes in the Arctic and, moreover, the global warming, is determined exclusively by seismogenic triggering mechanism(s) described here. (But) the Earth’s climatic system is complex and for its description it is quite natural to utilize coupled models involving geochemical, geophysical and meteorological factors, interacting with each other.
“The mechanism of climate warming of geodynamic nature, discussed in this paper, is essentially an addition to the existing models, and is aimed primarily at explaining the reasons for the observed sharp change in climatic trends in the Arctic in the 20th and 21st centuries.”
Their hypothesis, they freely admit, is “a novel view of the problem, which, of course, should undergo comprehensive verification and analysis, both in terms of consistency with observational data and detailed study of physical and mathematical basics of this new concept being developed.”
The gas hydrates mentioned in the paper are a relatively new player in the climate-change discussion.
“If large amounts of methane were to reach the atmosphere from degassing gas hydrates, global warming might be exacerbated. In Earth’s deep past, methane has been a potentially important agent during other periods of rapid warming.”
The Russians suggest it is possible some large releases of methane from gas hydrates might have already taken place in the Arctic due to seismic stress.
Admittedly, they write, “one needs to assume that the gas-saturated medium is in a metastable critical state, which can be easily disturbed by relatively weak stress perturbations. The numerous sources of data (however) suggest that the Arctic zone is characterized by the presence of metastable gas hydrates occurring at much shallower depths than is required for their thermodynamic stability.”
Basically the argument is that these “metastable” hydrates had already begun to migrate out of shallow Arctic sediments as methane gas only to be blocked by ice formations.
“This phenomenon was explained on the basis of the so-called gas hydrate self-preservation effect, which was confirmed by laboratory experiments,” the scientists write.
Those experiments found that in the cold of the Arctic, hydrates in the process of transitioning to methane gas were soon stopped “due to the formation of thin ice films around the particles of dissociating gas hydrate because of the rapid freezing of water; these thin ice films block the released gas and the remaining hydrate mass, preventing its further dissociation.”
But the ice film is weak.
“Due to the very small thickness of the ice shells (about one thousandth of a millimeter) and their limited strength, relatively small extra stresses are sufficient to break up these shells and release the trapped gas, making it possible for its filtration through the interconnected ice microcracks produced from the ice shells destruction,” the scientists wrote.
The cracking of these shells along with the release of methane gas from Arctic permafrost is, they say, “the proposed physical mechanism responsible for an abrupt warming in the Arctic as a result of high-energy mechanical disturbances in the marginal region of the Arctic lithosphere caused by great earthquakes in the Aleutian subduction zone and propagating across the Arctic shelf and adjacent territories…..
“Based on the presented concept, it is straight forward to make a retrospective forecast that methane emission activity into the atmosphere should have arisen rapidly on the Arctic shelf and in adjacent regions just before the beginning of an abrupt warming in the Arctic in 1920 and 1980….”
The latter warming is continuing, but there are now also concerns a supervolcano in the Aleutian arc could explode with enough force to fill the atmosphere with so much sunlight blocking debris that the whole planet – not just the Arctic – could experience a significant drop in temperature.
The author is far from thinking that the observed climate changes in the Arctic and, moreover, the global warming, is determined exclusively by seismogenic triggering mechanism described here. The Earth’s climatic system is complex and for its description it is quite natural to utilize coupled models involving geochemical, geophysical and meteorological factors, interacting with each other [24,25,26,27,28]. The mechanism of climate warming of geodynamic nature, discussed in this paper, is essentially an addition to the existing models, and is aimed primarily at explaining the reasons for the observed sharp change in climatic trends in the Arctic in the XX and XXI centuries.
climate change deniers.
The author is far from thinking that the observed climate changes in the Arctic and, moreover, the global warming, is determined exclusively by seismogenic triggering mechanism described here. The Earth’s climatic system is complex and for its description it is quite natural to utilize coupled models involving geochemical, geophysical and meteorological factors, interacting with each other [24,25,26,27,28]. The mechanism of climate warming of geodynamic nature, discussed in this paper, is essentially an addition to the existing models, and is aimed primarily at explaining the reasons for the observed sharp change in climatic trends in the Arctic in the XX and XXI centuries.
Anyone that thinks we have figured out how our multivariable chaotic climate works (and what causes what) needs a broader view of the research being done by scientists not sullied by “global warming” government grants. We are just on the threshold of beginning to understand some of the major reasons for our planet’s weather and climate ups and downs, not to mention the movement of land masses over our hot molten core of melted rock and metals.
Here is another example of work being done to look at something previously attributed to “proof” of CO2 driven “global warming”.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/12/29/newly-discovered-greenland-plume-drives-thermal-activities-in-the-arctic/
The great Harness it..!! Make it a useable energy. Why are no great scientist exploring the possibilities of methane cars, power plants and such. Too busy on those electric cars are they, or are they awaiting the aliens to bring them the technology again? “Oh hail the great pyramid gods” Get methane catching baggies and a fix them to the rear ends of all cattle and sheep, heck even on ourselves. Running low on fuel, just eat beans, and take a poof in your tank. Good for the environment and for the stressed bean growers.
You all know what they are really trying to do here, is they are once again trying to put the sole blame of all the worlds troubles on little ole Alaska again. “Typical” and I will Not be standing for it … .. Wow, this really is some good Moosehead beer, clears the mind for deep thought…eh..!…
There’s a lot to get through on this one. I do not doubt that there are unknown causes, rhythms, and cycles that we are just discovering or might discover at some point in the future. This could very well be one of those. Using the start of the Industrial Revolution, which happened to coincide with the end of the “little ice age” sets the bar disproportionately low compared to the average temperature since the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene, in fact it only gives us a window of a few hundred years through which to view what “normal” is.
All gasses studied in the lab are viewed under that laboratory lens and their impact are, or should be, accounted for in the real world environment. Meaning methane and CO2 in the lab are known quantities and real world effects are also a known quantity. I admittedly know absolutely nothing about how UV being absorbed by water vapor at the frequencies methane would absorb those same UV rays comes in to play regarding the greenhouse effect capabilities of the methane molecule, but that sure sounds like something that a guy could make up pretty easily…I wouldn’t mind seeing a study explaining that.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.03098.pdf
Is a recent paper concerning the absorbing frequencies of the primary greenhouse gasses and how they overlap.
Thanks Ken, that might take me a bit to get through.
What is the reason for CO2 being exactly 400 ppm from sea-level all the way through the mesosphere, seems odd to me, especially considering the other four gases had such dramatic changes in concentrations. Is CO2 somehow immune to gravity, atmospheric pressure, and the other conditions that impact the other gases in this study even though some of the gases have a specific gravity that is greater and some have a specific gravity that is less than CO2?
So I got through that paper, I might have skimmed through the center sections at certain points when I thought my eyes and ears might start bleeding. For a while there I was wondering if this was just a bunch of formulas and laboratory analysis, but it seems this paper backs up it’s modeling with some actual observations.
Section 8 Comparison of Model Intensities to Satellite Observations
An important test is to compare calculations to observations. Fig 15 shows vertical spectral
intensities, ˜I(0), measured with a Michaelson interferometer from a satellite over the Sahara
Desert, the Mediterranean Sea and Antarctica [44]. The figure also shows values of the
vertical intensity, ˜I, calculated with (27).
The section that I understand the best is the one that uses at least some plain English, Section 9 Conclusions (especially the last two paragraphs quoted below)
The most striking fact about radiation transfer in Earth’s atmosphere is summarized by
Figs. 4 and 5. Doubling the current concentrations of the greenhouse gases CO2, N2O and
CH4 increases the forcings by a few percent for cloud-free parts of the atmosphere. Table 3
shows the forcings at both the top of the atmosphere and at the tropopause are comparable
to those found by other groups.
Radiative forcing depends strongly on latitude, as shown in Figs. 7 and 8. Near the
wintertime poles, with very little water vapor in the atmosphere, CO2 dominates the radiative forcing. The radiation to space from H2O, CO2 and O3 in the relatively warm upper
atmosphere can exceed the radiation from the cold surface of the ice sheet and the TOA
forcing can be negative.
Fig. 9 as well as Tables 2 and 4 show that at current concentrations, the forcings from all
greenhouse gases are saturated. The saturations of the abundant greenhouse gases H2O and
CO2 are so extreme that the per-molecule forcing is attenuated by four orders of magnitude
with respect to the optically thin values. Saturation also suppresses the forcing power per
molecule for the less abundant greenhouse gases, O3, N2O and CH4, from their optically thin
values, but far less than for H2O and CO2.
Table 2 and Fig. 10 show the overlap of absorption bands of greenhouse gases causes their
forcings to be only roughly additive. One greenhouse gas interferes with, and diminishes, the
forcings of all others. But the self-interference of a greenhouse gas with itself, or saturation, is
a much larger effect than interference between different gases. Table 4 shows that for optically
thin conditions, the forcing power per molecule is about the same for all greenhouse gases,
a few times 10−22 W per molecule.
Of course I probably didn’t understand any of that paper…
Steve,
http://sepp.org publishes a free weekly email compilation with links for just about every article and paper related to climate published that week.
Its free and comprehensive.
Great source of information from all points of view.
Hmm. Several issues to consider: As pointed out by another commenter, the properties of methane in the atmosphere are very different than the lab. The “lag times” between warming events and catastrophic Aleutian earthquakes seems to be beyond the “half life” of atmospheric methane (though methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas, unlike the very refractory carbon dioxide molecule, methane breaks down in less than 20 years after release.) You would also think in geologic time big Aleutian earthquakes wouldn’t be uncommon so that discharge of degraded clathrates would regularly reduce the source and be part of the background. Final issue is the apparent “localization” bias: [“Global warming may cause our coastal village to have to be relocated, so we must reduce the carbon dioxide emissions from our diesel generator”.] The implication that arctic temperature spikes are a result of arctic earthquakes implies that either the whole world’s atmosphere was affected proportionately or that local methane releases created a temperature “magnifying glass” on the arctic.
Methane is only 30 time more powerful than CO2 in the artificially dry atmosphere created in a laboratory. The atmosphere outdoors always has a component of water vapor which absorbs the same UV frequencies that methane does. As a result, when the methane concentration in the atmosphere increases, its greenhouse effect is small because the water vapor has already absorbed the UV at the frequencies methane would absorb them.
Classic case of laboratory experiments not including all the variables that exist in the real world.
“It is a given of science that correlations do not prove causation, but they are sometimes a starting point in the search for causes.”
Too many people (particularly gun control proponents) forget that correlation can’t prove causation, but an absence of correlation does disprove it. If you can’t show a correlation, you can’t claim causation.
As the authors make clear, this is specific model is to explore a specific observation. Rather than grab on to this in order to make an argument against human causation, it would be best to reread the last paragraph.
If only we could find a way to find and capture methane then convert it into less harmful carbon dioxide.
The graph Craig shows clearly contradicts carbon dioxide as a major driver of global warming. From 1940 to 1970 there were enormous increases in carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere yet tempuratures fell. Man made global warming is the “religio” and people that say give me an experiment to test your hypothesis are canceled.
Kevin,the way I interpret the chart is, deviations from the average observed temp.looks to me with the pristine view of hindsight, that we are indeed moving to the right(which is always better than the alternative when thinking of time),and to the upper right corner.Not many things in the known universe that dont move in cycles or waves,least from my peanut gallery view.Looks to me like we are stretching this rubber band pretty good.No reason we couldn’t slack off only to go back to pegged.Maybe another way to think of this chart is like the measure of Rate of Change,rather than absolute degrees.
Heres an interesting corollary, its known history only goes back about as far as good Arctic WX data as well
https://climate.ncsu.edu/climate/patterns/pdo
Boy, now wouldnt that just cook the goose who is laying that bogus multi-trillion dollar, “Global Warming” tax egg?
“but there are now also concerns a supervolcano in the Aleutian arc could explode with enough force to fill the atmosphere with so much sunlight blocking debris that the whole planet – not just the Arctic – could experience a significant drop in temperature. “