Permafrost melt accelerating

SUBHEAD: Sign up for your favorite end times cult soon - Arctic permafrost is gushing massive plumes of methane.  

By John Laumer on 13 December 2011 for TreeHugger -  
(http://www.treehugger.com/climate-change/sign-your-favorite-end-times-cult-soon-permafrost-gushing-methane-skyward.html)

 
Image above: Massive methane plumes rise out of melting permafrost. From original article.
 
Fossil Fuelers, Right Wing Think Tanks, & Republicans may have hosed our future irretrievably. Waiting ten more years for a half-made climate treaty to be finalized is not acceptable on the basis of these observations alone.

Russian scientists are reporting a very grim omen. Methane has been observed gushing forth from a 1,000 meter in diameter plume, erupting from melting arctic permafrost. There are likely thousands of similar methane plumes gushing skyward from permafrost plains similar to the one pictured.

Do we rush now toward untested geo-engineering options, letting the military industrial complex take charge with expensive rocketry and sulfur cannons? I'd rather see Obama get forceful on the subject, cutting the legs out from under the Newt, who'll otherwise spout off his own gushing plume of made up solutions from the election fields of Iowa.

Here's an excerpt from UK Independent coverage:
The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.
In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov, of the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.
"Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing," Dr Semiletov said. "I was most impressed by the sheer scale and high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them."
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