Because it's in East Antarctica -- and the "warm" deeper waters from the Southern Ocean are melting into the glacier and its whole catchment area. Let me show you:
Here is a map of Antarctica with the Totten Glacier highlighted in pale blue:
Note bedding under the catchment area is up to about a mile below sea level! So before the glacier were to visibly melt, it could become severely undermined by the warm waters already eating away at its base. Which means, if we're especially unlucky (or God is or The Gods are especially angry at us or playing tricks with us) this thing could get completely undermined before detatching from its above-sea-level neighbours. And if it does, when it does a huge chunk of ice the size of California and 1-1/2 miles high (at least) will go sailing off to the North or falling into its basin -- and nine-tenths of that height will be underwater!
Towering Totten and the Coming MultiMeter Sea-Level Rise
A new scientific study has found that the Totten Glacier is fundamentally unstable and could significantly contribute to a possible multi-meter sea level rise this Century under mid-range and worst case warming scenarios.
408 Parts per million CO2. 490 parts per million CO2e. This is the amount of heat-trapping CO2 and total CO2 equivalent for all heat-trapping gasses now in the Earth’s atmosphere. Two measures representing numerous grave potential consequences.
We’re Locking in 120-190 Feet of Sea Level Rise Long Term
Looking at the first number — 408 parts per million CO2 — we find that the last time global levels of this potent heat-trapping gas were so high was during the Middle Miocene Climate Optimum of 15-17 million years ago. During this time, the Greenland Ice Sheet did not exist. East Antarctic glacial ice was similarly scarce. And the towering glaciers of West Antarctica were greatly reduced. Overall, global sea levels were 120 to 190 feet higher than they are today. Meanwhile, atmospheric temperatures were between 3 and 5 degrees Celsius hotter than those experienced during the late 19th Century
Large sections of Antarctica rest below sea level. A physical feature that renders substantial portions of Antarctica’s glaciers very vulnerable to rising ocean temperatures. Since the latent heat content of water is substantially higher than that of air, even comparatively small ocean temperature increases can cause significant melt in sea-facing glaciers and in below sea level glacial basins.
Now if the Totten Glaicier were all to melt, it would contribute about 3.5 meters of additional sea level -- over 11 feet, according to The Washington Post. Now this huge chunk of ice isn't going to all melt and leave the rest of Antarctica frozen. Instead, as it melts, Greenland, West Antarctica and other areas in East Antarctica will also melt, as they are doing now. So we could get, say, 1 meter from Totten, 1 from Greenland, 1 from West Antarctica and 1 or 2 from other parts of East Antarctica by 2100. Guess what! That's 13 to 16 feet of sea level rise! South Florida will be inundated. Chesapeake Bay, enlarged to the point of Ridiculousness. The Central Valley in California, flooded (maybe). The Missisissippi Delta in Louisiana, destroyed. Courtesy of the Fossil Fuels Derivatives Beast.
A lovely cartoon by Tom Toles of the Washington Post.
Source and Copyright (c) The Washington Post.
This post consists of snippets of information found at Robertscribbler.
Tips o' th' hat to Robertscribbler, dtlange, coloradobob, june, and patternreplicas.
A CO2 milestone in Earth’s history Antarctic field project captures 400 ppm levels
400 ppm of Carbon Dioxide now seen over West Antarctic Peninsula.
Source: ucar.edu.
May 12, 2016 | Earth’s atmosphere is crossing a major threshold, as high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2)—the leading driver of recent climate change—are beginning to extend even to the globe’s most remote region. Scientists flying near Antarctica this winter captured the moment with airborne CO2 sensors during a field project to better understand the Southern Ocean’s role in global climate.
This illustration shows the atmosphere near Antarctica in January, just as air masses over the Southern Ocean began to exceed 400 parts per million of CO2. The 400 ppm level is regarded as a milestone by climate scientists, as the last time concentrations of the heat-trapping gas reached such a point was millions of years ago, when temperatures and sea levels were far higher.
The field project, led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and known as ORCAS, found that there is still air present in the Southern Hemisphere that has less than 400 ppm of CO2—but just barely. In the north, the atmosphere had first crossed that threshold in 2013, as shown by observations taken at Mauna Loa, Hawaii…
‘The air found by ORCAS with less than 400 ppm of CO2 was located in a wedge at lower altitudes. At higher altitudes, the air had already exceeded 400 ppm. This pattern is mostly a consequence of the way the air circulates in the region. At these southerly latitudes, the air arrives from the Northern Hemisphere at higher elevations and then mixes downward.’
Proof That Koch-Backed Professors Are Using Universities To Spread Right-Wing Policies
“Economic freedom centers” — or institutes with conservative, libertarian missions that are backed by the Charles Koch Foundation — are tightly controlled by the interests of the conservative foundation, according to remarks from Koch-backed professors and executives at the Association of Private Enterprise Education’s annual meeting in Las Vegas.
The remarks were recorded by UnKoch My Campus, a group that focuses on the influence of powerful donors on research and coursework in universities, and shared by Greenpeace staff. At the event, Koch-backed professors and Charles Koch Foundation executives said that students act as “foot soldiers” for free enterprise ideals, deans will take money from anyone, and the slightest mention of the foundation’s legal team can bring universities back in line.
Koch-backed institutes made their way back into the news lately after recent reports that $5 million was earmarked for these centers at Arizona public universities. …
Another amplifying feedback to human-forced warming. - Robertscribbler.
New Ice Age knowledge Pacific stores the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide at depths of thousands of meters
May 13, 2016, Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research
Summary: An international team of researchers has gained new insights into the carbon dioxide exchange between ocean and atmosphere, thus making a significant contribution to solving one of the great scientific mysteries of the ice ages.
In the past 800,000 years of climate history, the transitions from interglacials and ice ages were always accompanied by a significant reduction in the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere. It then fell from 280 to 180 ppm (parts per million). Where this large amount of carbon dioxide went to and the processes through which the greenhouse gas reached the atmosphere again has been controversial until now. The scientists have now managed to locate a major carbon dioxide reservoir at a depth of 2000 to 4300 metres in the South Pacific and reconstruct the details of its gas emission history. Their new findings have been published open access in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
The southern Pacific Ocean is regarded as one of the largest ventilation windows of the world oceans. This is where the global conveyor belt of ocean currents transports the carbon-rich water from great depths to the surface of the sea for a short time. The gas concentration balance between water and air takes place where the two meet. This usually means that the carbon-rich water masses release the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide they had stored into the atmosphere, thus contributing to the greenhouse effect and the warming of the earth.
Retreat of the ice followed by millennia of methane release
Date: May 13, 2016 Source: CAGE – Center for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Climate and Environment.
Summary: Methane was seeping from the seafloor for thousands of years following the retreat of the Barents Sea ice sheet, shows a groundbreaking new study.
Scientists have calculated that the present day ice sheets keep vast amounts of climate gas methane in check. Ice sheets are heavy and cold, providing pressure and temperatures that contain methane in form of ice-like substance called gas hydrate. If the ice sheets retreat the weight of the ice will be lifted from the ocean floor, the gas hydrates will be destabilised and the methane will be released.
Studies conducted at CAGE have previously shown that ice sheets and methane hydrates are closely connected, and that release of methane from the seafloor has followed the retreat of the Barents Sea ice sheet some 20,000 years ago. But is all such release of the potent climate gas bound to be catastrophic?
Not necessarily, according to a new study published in Nature Communications. It shows that the methane was indeed released as the ice sheets retreated. However the seepage did not occur in one major pulse, but over a period of 7000 to 10000 years following the initial release.
"The release was too slow to significantly impact the concentration of methane in the atmosphere." says researcher and project leader Aivo Lepland at Norwegian geological Survey (NGU) and CAGE. This may help explain why we have yet to discover a signal for such events in the various climate records of the past.
"That would make the continental and land-sea margin zones of Greenland, Antarctica, Svalbard and the CAA hot spot regions to look for." - Robertscribbler.
This Is What It Looks Like When People All Over The World Break Free From Fossil Fuels
Protest march in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Source and Copyright (c) Commondreams.org.
And this is what happens when people make things happen:
Two-acre rooftop greenhouse garden. Source: Greg via Robertscribbler.
"Here is the world’s largest rooftop greenhouse, two acres, producing local food otherwise grown on 50 acres of land." - Greg.
But often politics get in the way, as recently when in Nevada one tycoon, Warren Buffet, darling of the Democrats, has his way and the State Legislature destroys two entire industries: solar power station construction and solar panel installation.
"Can we please stop burning the fossil fuels that are setting this stuff into motion? The risks in continued burning are just too great. And the more we research, the more we find added risks." - Robertscribbler
"Climate science and description of phenomena and events: Great! Political analysis and solutions: Insufficient." - patternreplicas
Jacque Fresco (scientist) on Politics and Legislation:
Well we won't get anything done if Trump gets to become President: watch the video below and see how he wrecked the local pristine sand dune environment near Aberdeen Scotland and ruined local people's lives... and even sicced the local police on them.
You've Been Trumped!
Granted, Hilary is bad -- she has backing of fossil fuel interests, even the Koch Brothers -- but if Trump gets in, everybody and everything will get Trumped. The American People, the biosphere, the rest of the people of the Earth, including Putin, who will not hesitate to declare war on us if Trump eyes his country as another place and government to just push over.
Ya know, what we need is someone with the “charisma” of Donald Trump to rise up and say, “We need to stop, just stop, burning fossil fuels until those in charge can tell us what the hell is going on?”
I'm reblogging two posts from Robertscribbler about the weird weather that's been going on.
First, a new item about how the mangled Jet Stream has permitted so much warm air into the Arctic, it's forcing its way into NW Siberia and causing an Arctic Vortex invasion into East Asia, even Southeast Asia.
NW Siberian Warm Snap and East Asian Cold Snap
Source: Earth Nullschool via Robertscribbler.
Arctic Heatwave Drives Deadly Asian Cold Snap
by Robertscribbler, 26 January 2016 Link
In the Arctic today, there’s a warm wind howling over Siberia. It’s a wind blowing from the northwest. A wind originating from the Arctic Ocean. Siberia is warming up today because warm air blew in from the direction of the North Pole. This should strike everyone as ridiculously, insanely odd.
In Okinawa it snowed for the first time since 1977 this weekend. In Taiwan, a cold snap turned deadly killing 85 as tens of thousands more huddled in homes that lacked any form of central heating. In South Korea, 500 flights were grounded due to unseasonable weather. In Hong Kong, the temperature was 3 C — the same temperature as a region near the southwestern coast of Svalbard east of Greenland and above the Arctic Circle.
What the hell is going on? In short, a global warming driven heat-up of the Arctic has punched a hole in the Jet Stream and driven chill, Arctic air all the way into portions of Southeast Asia that seldom ever see temperatures go below 60 degrees Fahrenheit (16 Celsius).
Which leads into the second post by Robertscribbler, concerning El Nino and why the massive storms that accompanied previoous El Ninos haven't shown up in California so far this year.
Polar Amplification vs a Godzilla El Nino — Is the Pacific Storm Track Being Shoved North by Arctic Warming?
by Robertscribbler, 26 January 2016 Link
It’s an El Nino year. One of the top three strongest El Ninos on record. The strongest by some NOAA measures. And we are certainly feeling its effects all over the world. From severe droughts in Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America, to Flooding in the Central and Eastern US, Southern Brazil, and India, these impacts, this year and last, have been extreme and wide-ranging. During recent days, Peru and Chile saw enormous ocean waves and high tides swamping coastlines. Record flooding and wave height events for some regions. All impacts related to both this powerful El Nino and the overall influence of human-forced warming by more than 1 C above 1880s temperatures on the whole of the hydrological cycle.
Amped up by a global warming related 7 percent increase in atmospheric water vapor (and a related increase in evaporation and precipitation over the Earth’s surface), many of these El Nino related impacts have followed a roughly expected pattern (you can learn more about typical El Nino patterns and links to climate change related forcings in this excellent video by Dr Kevin Trenberth here). However, so far, some of the predicted kinds of events you’d typically see during a strong El Nino have not yet emerged. A circumstance that may also be related to the ongoing human-forced warming of the globe.
Storm Track Not Making it Far Enough South
NE Pacific Storm, 26 January 2016.
Source: Earth Nullschool vis Robertscribbler.
Particularly, there has been an absence of powerful storms running in over Southern California then surging on into Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas. During strong El Nino events, heat and moisture bleeding off the super-warmed Equator have typically fed powerful storms racing across the Pacific. These storms have tended to engulf the entire US Pacific Coast from San Diego through to Seattle. However, much of the storm energy is often directed further south toward Central and Southern California.
The life cycle GHG emissions per kWh from nuclear power plants are two orders of magnitude lower than those of fossil-fuelled electricity generation and comparable to most renewables (EC, 1995; Krewitt et al., 1999; Brännström-Norberg et al., 1996; Spadaro et al., 2000). Hence it is an effective GHG mitigation option, especially by way of investments in the lifetime extension of existing plants.
We humans can't still have our power and GHG too. Building out nuclear is not ‘effective GHG mitigation’ – unless we reduce our total energy footprint and we reduce our consumption of fossil fuels even more rapidly than that. Because using more energy people say is "better" but it isn't especially if it’s still creating GHG (and still oil-derived and oil-dependent – something that usually is conveniently forgotten). The whole life-cycle of site preparation, construction, maintenance, power production, decommission and disposal of radioactive wastes and what this ‘enables’ for the human community needs to be taken into account. Without reducing consumption and energy use in toto It’s still BAU. It’s not "mitigation" – just more emissions and creation of wastes – which we still haven't properly figured out how to get rid of or handle safely.
But if we can jump these hurdles (i.e., solve these problems and break these bad FF-dependency habits), then we should use nuclear power to replace the equivalent of fossil-fuel-derived power.
Big Oil and the small oil extraction companies too are getting in a heap of trouble. Big Oil is in scandal over dissassembling the truth over Climate Change while they KNEW the truth, and both Big Oil and the small fry are in trouble over their debts. The latter troubles do not bode well for the oil companies when the supply tightens up again, because of investors issues with the companies' debts that went bad before that point in the future.
Big Oil braced for global warming while it fought regulations
By Amy Lieberman and Susanne Rust of the LA Times
Dec. 31, 2015 Link
“A few weeks before seminal climate change talks in Kyoto back in 1997, Mobil Oil took out a bluntly worded advertisement in the New York Times and Washington Post.
“Let’s face it: The science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil,” the ad said. “Scientists cannot predict with certainty if temperatures will increase, by how much and where changes will occur.”
One year earlier, though, engineers at Mobil Oil were concerned enough about climate change to design and build a collection of exploration and production facilities along the Nova Scotia coast that made structural allowances for rising temperatures and sea levels.
The problem is it’s not just AGW-Deniers and Republicans. It’s pretty much the entire political apparatus. Congress puts poison pills in must-pass bills and Obama signs off on them. Every. Fracking. Time.
During Paris Climate Summit, Obama Signed Exxon-, Koch-Backed Bill Expediting Pipeline Permits
By Steve Horn of Desmog Blog
December 31, 2015 Link
Just over a week before the U.S. signed the Paris climate agreement at the conclusion of the COP21 United Nations summit, President Barack Obama signed a bill into law with a provision that expedites permitting of oil and gas pipelines in the United States.
The legal and conceptual framework for the fast-tracking provision on pipeline permitting arose during the fight over TransCanada's Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. President Barack Obama initially codified that concept via Executive Order 13604 — signed the same day as he signed an Executive Order to fast-track construction of Keystone XL's southern leg — and this provision “builds on the permit streamlining project launched by” Obama according to corporate law firm Holland & Knight.
The first U.S. shipment of crude oil to an overseas buyer departed a Texas port on Thursday, just weeks after a 40-year ban on most such exports was lifted.
The Theo T tanker has left NuStar Energy LP’s dockside facility in Corpus Christi, Texas, along the western shore of the Gulf of Mexico, Mary Rose Brown, a spokeswoman for NuStar, said in an e-mail. The ship is carrying a cargo of oil and condensate to Italy from ConocoPhillips’s wells in south Texas that was sold to Swiss trading house Vitol Group.
A campaign by oil explorers including Continental Resources Inc., Chevron Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp. to lift the 1970s-era export prohibition culminated in a Dec. 18 congressional decision to end the ban.
Well whaddya know! Lots and lots and lots of oil can be materialised into existence using accounting parlor tricks! And then disappeared when the tricks are corrected. The investors and creditors won't won't be happy, tho'.
Billions of Barrels of US Oil Set to Disappear. Poof
Tom Lewis of The Daily Impact Link
In a few weeks, several billion barrels of American oil will vanish in an instant. (I am not making this stuff up: the headline is right there on Bloomberg Business, hardly a chicken-little medium.) This is — shortly to be was — the oil that just a few months ago (Remember? When we were young, and happy?) was to return us to energy independence, to make us the number one oil producer in the world, to bring the happy days here again for good.
But much of that oil is about to disappear, not with the boom of an oil-train explosion or deep-well blowout or terrorist bomb, but with the quiet click of a computer mouse. And this time it’s not (as it often has been before) the Energy Information Administration revising downward a previous guess about oil reserves.
As the American shale-oil boom, a.k.a. American Oil Revolution, was accelerating back in 2009, the Masters of the Oil Universe demanded and got an accommodation from the Securities and Exchange Commission: it was made easier for the oil companies to claim as hard assets, for purposes of valuing their companies and borrowing money, the value of all the oil they estimated to be “in reserve,” which is to say lying somewhere under the ground they had under their control.
The oil companies’ estimates of their own “proven reserves” were astronomical, of course. In the careful words of one expert observer, David Hughes, “There was too much optimism built into their forecasts.” Translation: They lied.
Richard Heinberg gives a presentation here that focuses on the false promises of fracking, and how since the mid-2000s the major oil companies have invested tens of billions in expanding oil production without hardly any increase in the amount extracted. They are seeing rapidly diminishing returns, and need to maintain production levels. It’s why there is so much fracking and digging up of tar sands and drilling in the deepwater ocean and the Arctic. The low-cost, easy-to-get oil is depleting now but our dependency on oil remains.
Robert Scribbler has this to say about Prof. Heinberg's conclusions:
The old, cheap oil is a diminishing fraction of current production. Growth comes from the expensive unconventional a which is one major reason why we have so many companies facing bankruptcy. From the point of view of strategic use of money to reduce future carbon emissions, now is prime time for divestment. But given a still general lack of strong government policy, the energy markets will face a long series of shocks as a result. Laissez faire again and the result is mass malinvestment in fossil fuels and assets stranded in wave after wave.
And as the floods come down the Mississippi like a million tractor trailers barreling down the Mass. Pike, Exxon is able to close a refinery to minimize flood damage in Memphis due to lack of demand because of the weird, warm weather we've been having. The weird, warm weather that's being caused by too much Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere due to combustion of fossil fuels, particularly coal and oil.
Southern states brace for surging Mississippi River flooding
By Victoria Cavaliere of Reuters
Additional reporting by Daniel Wallis, Erwin Seba, Justin Madden and Mary Wisniewski
Bernard Orr and Tom Brown, eds.
Fri Jan 1, 2016 Link
Officials in Louisiana are checking levees daily, and Exxon Mobil Corp has decided to shut its 340,571 barrel-per-day refined products terminal in Memphis, Tennessee, as floodwaters threatened to inundate the facility just south of the city’s downtown.
“All that water’s coming south and we have to be ready for it,” Louisiana Lieutenant Governor-Elect Billy Nungesser told CNN. “It’s a serious concern. It’s early in the season. We usually don’t see this until much later.”
And Robert Scribbler finds it "very ironic and more than a little disturbing that the same oil companies that have been shoring up their own infrastructure to deal with climate change keep blocking policies that are now much needed to prevent damage to an undefended public."
Of course, the falling oil prices are going to force oil companies big and small to cut costs any way they can, or face defaults on their debts. We should expect plenty of oil company defauts and bankruptcies in 2016 which could potentially shut-in a lot of oil reserves underground (good news for Climate Change!) due to investors, including big banks, who were once bitten and will be twice shy.
Oil drops 31% in 2015 on global crude glut
By William Watts and Jenny W. Hsu
Dec 31, 2015 Link
Oil futures ended higher Thursday in the final trading session of 2015, but posted a steep annual drop for the second year in a row as markets continue to wrestle with a global glut of crude. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in February rose 44 cents, or 1.2%, to finish at $37.04 a barrel. For the year, the U.S. benchmark dropped 30.5% and has lost 62.4% over the last two years. Crude hadn’t dropped two years in a row since 1998. February Brent crude, the global benchmark, rose 82 cents, or 2.3%, on London’s ICE Futures exchange to settle at $37.28 a barrel. Brent fell 35% in 2015, marking its third straight yearly drop. Oil trimmed gains somewhat after oil-field services firm Baker Hughes said the total number of U.S. oil rigs fell by two this week to 536.
Oil’s bounceback on Thursday likely reflected some short covering ahead of year-end and a three-day weekend, said Phil Flynn at Price Futures. U.S. markets will be closed Friday for the New Year’s Day holiday. Flynn said traders might be nervous about maintaining short positions amid rising tensions within Iran that could threaten the implementation of a nuclear accord that was expected to result in the lifting of sanctions that have prevented the country from exporting oil. Iran’s president has ordered his defense minister to expedite the country’s ballistic missile program following newly planned U.S. sanctions, he said Thursday, according to The Wall Street Journal. With U.S. production “growing for the last few weeks and global inventories being near storage limits, this is yet another reminder that the supply glut could take a long time to clear, which may mean even lower oil prices in the near term,” said Fawad Razaqzad at Forex.com.
October 2015 temps of 1.28 C above 1880s levels…. That’s 64% of the allotted 2 C target. Worse when you compare it to the newly-agreed 1.5 C target from the COP21 conference.
We knew it was going to be a record breaker. We knew that atmospheric greenhouse gasses in the range of 400 parts per million CO2 and 485 parts per million CO2e, when combined with one of the top three strongest El Ninos in the Pacific, would result in new all-time global record high temperatures. But what we didn’t know was how substantial the jump would ultimately be.
Today, the numbers were made public by NASA. And I hate to say it, but it’s a real doozy. Overall, according to NASA, Climate Year 2015 — the 12 month period from December of 2014 through November of 2015 — was 0.84 C hotter than NASA’s 20th Century Baseline. That’s 0.11 C hotter than previous hottest year 2014 and a full 0.21 C hotter than climate change deniers’ favorite cherry — 1998. In other words past record hot years are being left in the dust as the world is heating up to ever more dangerously warm global temperatures.
In any case, the current NASA Graph above is going to need some serious adjusting as the new global average for climate year 2015 is simply off the top of the chart. A new jump that gives lie to the increasingly obvious fake claim made by climate change deniers over the past two years that global warming somehow ‘paused.’
But aside from reality once again making the fossil fuel cheerleaders of the world (aka climate change deniers) look increasingly imbecilic, 2015’s new temperature increase is a visible sign of increasing climate danger. This year’s 0.84 C temperature departure above NASA’s 20th Century baseline is 1.06 C hotter than 1880s values. It’s a number just 0.44 C (or two more strong El Ninos) away from crossing the very dangerous 1.5 C threshold that nations of the world recently pledged to attempt to avoid at the Paris Climate Summit. It’s also a number more than halfway toward hitting the catastrophic 2 C warming threshold. Perhaps more ominously, Monthly temperature departures in October of 2015 hit a range of 1.06 C above the 20th Century baseline and 1.28 C above 1880s averages — shorter term ranges that are already coming close to testing the 1.5 C threshold.
And just how much of a percentage of 1.5 C of the COP21's agreed-to global warming target is 1.28 C above 1880s levels is? About 85%. Forget waiting for peak oil, peak natural gas and peak coal to occur if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change and even more bizarre global weirding -- business as usual warped by fossil fuel extraction peaks and declines will still yield an atmospheric CO2 content of about 550 ppm (CO2e would be worse), yielding an ECS temperature rise of 3 C and an ESS rise of 6 C over the space of a thousand years. In geological time, that means Near Term Human Extinction.
A team of scientists have found around 766 individual methane gas
flares within an area of seabed off the coast of Gisborne, in what has
been described as a "major advance" for science and a first for New
Zealand. The finding comes as the 11-member expedition ends
tomorrow morning with the NIWA deepwater research vessel Tangaroa
arriving back in Wellington.
The team, led by marine geologist Dr
Joshu Mountjoy, had been investigating the area after German and Kiwi
researchers last year revealed 99 seabed gas flares there using
state-of-the-art 3D and 2D seismic and echosounder technology. Following
this discovery, Dr Mountjoy and his team sought to find out whether
methane was getting through the water column to the ocean's surface and
into the atmosphere, and determine what contribution it was making to
global greenhouse gas. The first objective of the voyage was to remap gas flares in the area in fine detail, using a range of acoustic techniques. Surprisingly, the team discovered that every area of
carbonate rock and every fault seen on the seafloor was expelling gas,
and in total, they calculated there were near to 766 individual gas
flares within the area.
