Sediment cores taken from the Southern Ocean dating back 23 million years are providing insight into how ancient methane escaping from the seafloor could have led to regional or global climate and environmental changes, according to a study from two Texas A&M University researchers.
Sediment cores taken from the Southern Ocean dating back 23 million years are providing insight into how ancient methane escaping from the seafloor could have led to regional or global climate and environmental changes, according to a study from two Texas A&M University researchers.
Yige Zhang, assistant professor in the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M, and doctoral student Bumsoo Kim have had their work published in the current issue of Nature Geoscience.
The oceanographers examined cores – sediment samples from deep parts of the ocean floor – from the Oligocene-Miocene era, roughly 23 million years ago, from areas near Tasmania and Antarctica in the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean. There are billions of tons of carbon stored beneath the ocean floor as gas hydrates – ice-like crystals composed of water and natural gas. Past releases of methane are believed to be related to huge earth events, such as global warming and subsequent climate shifts.
“For a long time, people thought that methane released from the ocean floor could go into the atmosphere and directly contribute to the greenhouse effect, leading to rapid warming and even mass extinctions,” Zhang said. “But this idea is no longer popular in the last decade or so because we lack direct evidence of methane release in Earth’s history. Also, modern observations show that even when methane gases are released, they rarely make it to the atmosphere.”
However, Kim and Zhang are now able to document past methane release by using markers that consume methane. These “methane-eating” substances are preserved in sediments for tens of millions of years, the researchers said. They could provide direct evidence of methane release from different places in the Southern Ocean.
Read more at: Texas A&M University
Methane gas bubbles rising from the ocean floor (Photo Credit: Justin Kim)
