Category: Arctic

Well, It’s a Good Thing We Didn’t Buy Greenland

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Anthropogenic climate change is triggering a massive, and perhaps irreversible melting of Greenland’s ice fields.

It now appears that in addition to causing sea level rise, it appears that it is also triggering a massive release of mercury into the environment.

I had though at first that this was pollution from coal use over the past few hundred years, but this is far more extreme than would be predicted by this mechanism.  It appears that much of this mercury is natural and has been sequestered by the ice:

Greenland’s melting ice sheet is unleashing an astonishing amount of mercury into the nation’s rivers and fjords.

Downstream of three glaciers in the southwest, researchers have found coastal ecosystems are swimming in high concentrations of the heavy metal, which can build up in the food web to toxic levels.

The quantity of mercury observed in three glacial rivers and three fjords in Greenland was among the worst in recorded history. In fact, researchers say the concentrations here are only matched by the polluted waterways of Industrial China, which overall produces about one-third of the world’s mercury pollution.

As Greenland’s glaciers continue to melt in line with our worst-case scenarios, experts are worried even more trapped mercury (Hg) could one day be released into the environment.

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Previous studies have shown moderate mercury concentrations in run-off from melting glaciers, but the concentrations found in Greenland are two orders of magnitude higher than what scientists have found in other Arctic rivers.

“We didn’t expect there would be anywhere near that amount of mercury in the glacial water there,” says climate scientist Rob Spencer from Florida State University (FSU).

“Naturally, we have hypotheses as to what is leading to these high mercury concentrations, but these findings have raised a whole host of questions that we don’t have the answers to yet.”

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If the hunch is right, Greenland may very well be a neglected hotspot of natural mercury emissions, which have been trapped in ice for millennia. Even if we curb industrial mercury emissions tomorrow, the rapid melting of all this ice could sabotage human efforts to reduce pollution from this heavy metal to safe levels.

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“But mercury coming from climatically sensitive environments like glaciers could be a source that is much more difficult to manage.”

Given that Greenland is a major exporter of seafood, and the region is home to precious marine ecosystems, we’d best find out what’s going on.

The study was published in Nature Geoscience.

The fact that this may be a natural source is potentially even more concerning, because it can be far more extreme and unpredictable.

We are in for a bumpy ride.

We Are Unbelievably Screwed

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If the report of massive plums of methane developing is both true, and a new phenomena driven by anthropogenic climate change, then we are already on the far side of of this disaster, and we have gone from prevention to mitigation:

This week, scientists made a disturbing discovery in the Arctic Ocean: They saw “vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor,” as the Stockholm University put it in a release disclosing the observations. The plume of methane—a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat more powerfully than carbon dioxide, the chief driver of climate change—was unsettling to the scientists.

But it was even more unnerving to Dr. Jason Box, a widely published climatologist who had been following the expedition. As I was digging into the new development, I stumbled upon his tweet, which, coming from a scientist, was downright chilling:

If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re f’d.
— Jason Box (@climate_ice) July 29, 2014


Box, who is currently a professor of glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, has been studying the Arctic for decades. His accolade-packed Wikipedia page notes that he’s made some 20 expeditions to the Arctic since 1994, and served as the lead author on the Greenland section of NOAA’s State of the Climate report from 2008-2012. He also runs the Dark Snow project and writes about the latest findings in the field at his blog, Meltfactor.

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“We are ‘sniffing’ methane,” Ulf Hedman, the science coordinator of the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat, wrote in a post highlighted by Climate Change SOS. “We see the bubbles on video from the camera mounted on the CTD or the Multicorer. All analysis tells the signs. We are in a Mega flare. We see it in the water column, we read it above the surface, and we follow it up high into the sky with radars and lasers. We see it mixed in the air and carried away with the winds. Methane in the air.”

“Methane is more than 20 times more potent than CO2 in trapping infrared as part of the natural greenhouse effect,” Box said. “Methane getting to the surface—that’s potent stuff.”

It’s especially worrying because the Arctic is warming faster than nearly anywhere else on Earth. Now, along with melting sea ice and thawing permafrost, we have to add to our list of ‘feedback loop’ concerns that warming Arctic oceans may be releasing fonts of methane. That is, the warmer the ocean gets, the more methane gets spewed out of those stores on the continental shelf, and the warmer the ocean gets, ad infinitum.

We need to get beyond the denials being driven by people who hate Al Gore and people who are making too much money on fossil fuels to allow for meaningful action to be taken, and we need to do it now.

H/t Crooks and Liars.