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Antarctic ice may cover 4 billion tons of methane

By: Staff Writer

Posted: 09/1/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

LOS ANGELES -- Enormous reservoirs of the potent greenhouse gas methane could lurk beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, hastening the rate of global warming if portions of the sheet collapse, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature.

Methane, a byproduct of dead and decaying organic matter, probably exists within the sediments below the ice sheet, according to the study's authors. Though scientists have attempted to calculate the amount of greenhouse-gas-generating substances in Arctic permafrost, they have not previously considered reservoirs of methane beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.

Using mathematical models, the study authors estimated up to 4 billion tons of methane could reside beneath the ice sheet -- almost the same amount of methane some scientists have recently estimated exists within the Arctic permafrost.

"It's easy to forget that 35 million years ago, when the current period of Antarctic glaciation started, this continent was teeming with life," said Slawek Tulaczyk, a study co-author and professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "Some of the organic material produced by this life became trapped in sediments, which then were cut off from the rest of the world when the ice sheet grew. Our modelling shows that over millions of years, microbes may have turned this old organic carbon into methane."

The study was conducted by an international team of scientists and included researchers from the University of Bristol in Britain, Utrecht University in the Netherlands and the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

The authors wrote the methane reservoirs were likely to be shallow and could contribute to global warming if the east and west Antarctic ice sheets began to thin and retreat, as they have earlier in Earth's history.

The authors concluded the Antarctic ice sheet could constitute a previously neglected component of the world's total methane inventory.

-- Los Angeles Times

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 1, 2012 A18

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