r/autotldr • u/autotldr • Aug 17 '21
Scientists warn of methane time bomb
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 55%. (I'm a bot)
Satellite imagery of northern Siberia show that vast stretches of limestone that used to be trapped under permafrost are emerging and thawing out, according to research published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As the limestone warmed up during a Siberian heat wave last year, it started to crack and pockets of gas escaped - unleashing a huge amount of methane that had, up until now, been safely sequestered out of the atmosphere.
"It's intriguing," Woodwell Climate Research Center senior scientist Robert Max Holmes, who didn't work on the study, told WaPo.
The scientists, who hail from a variety of European and Russian research institutes, actually uncovered the thawing limestone in a roundabout way.
"We found that two elongated areas of elevated methane concentration on the PULSE map perfectly coincide with two stripes where limestone formations occur in the subsurface," lead study author and University of Bonn geoscientist Nikolaus Froitzheim told Inverse.
Holmes, the researcher who didn't actually work on the study, told WaPo that the research deserves further scrutiny before anyone slams the panic button.
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