Global warming may trigger carbon 'time bomb', scientist warns

Runaway explosive gas from a warming Arctic. At the Copenhagen Climate Congress this past week, climate researcher Dr. Philippe Ciais of the French Laboratory for Climate Sciences and the Environment warned that just a 2 degree Celsius rise in average world temperature could instigate a carbon “time bomb” in the vast regions of Arctic permafrost. The sustained warming of the soil would initiate bacterial composting, leading to a cycle of accelerated temperature increase and the possibly explosive, fatal release of billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

In a recent phone interview with Supreme Master Television, Dr. Isobel Simpson of the University of California – Irvine, USA, shared her views and concern about the current situation of thawing in the Arctic.

Dr. Isobel Simpson – Atmosphere chemist, University of California – Irvine, USA (F): A lot of the climate change feed back scenarios involve methane. You know there is all this methane trapped in the permafrost in the Arctic, and you already get research coming out saying, these lakes are thawing in Siberia and you’re getting all this methane released from these thawed lakes. There’s so much methane trapped under the permafrost, orders of magnitude more than what’s in the atmosphere now and the concern is, at what point does that methane start being released under melting scenarios?

That is what would keep me awake at night, is thinking about the future and where are the methane reservoirs. How stable are they? How fast is the change occurring in the Arctic? And can we get carbon dioxide under control before something catastrophic happens?

VOICE: Drs. Simpson, Ciais and colleagues, we thank you for alerting us to the dire situation caused by the warming atmosphere to our Earth. We pray that the world’s citizens quickly transition to a kinder, more considerate lifestyle to preserve all life on our beautiful globe.

During a videoconference with Supreme Master Television staff members in California, USA in January 2009, Supreme Master Ching Hai revealed through her insight and inner contact with inhabitants of Mars some truths about their history of climate change. Only a tiny minority had survived the runaway events, whose beginnings were similar in many ways to the current situation on Earth.

Supreme Master Ching Hai: The mass extinction came; they die, not only human beings on there, but the animals also; they die by two main poisonous gases. Namely, hydrogen sulfide and nitrous oxide, plus methane as the third cause. But hydrogen sulfide and methane from the livestock begun to warm the climate and then triggered more other gases from the ocean, from permafrost and glacier around their planet. Just like what is happening to our planet right now.

Supreme Master Ching Hai: As the destruction happened too fast and no one can help anyone. Only 0.2% of them escaped, around 2 million, into the underground caves. And that’s how they survive.

Supreme Master Ching Hai: They retain the history of what happened, so that the descendants know how to take care of what they have and not to be careless, and not to be so destructive anymore but more virtuous and spiritual.

Permafrost soil in Yangtze River area disappearing

cPermafrost is melting in China and Sweden. The Qinghai Institute of Geology and the China University of Geosciences released a joint report stating that permafrost in the Tibetan Plateau that is currently less than 10 meters thick is likely to disappear within the next seven years. Swedish researcher Margareta Johansson of Lund University has also reported that permafrost is either already gone or is being lost in northern Sweden region. Defined as soil that remains at or below freezing for two or more years, permafrost is known to play a vital role in balancing the ecosystem and stabilizing the ground itself, with melting leading to collapse, which in turn causes major damage to infrastructure and sometimes steeply increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Dedicated researchers of China and Sweden, we join in your concern over the melting permafrost. May our benevolent green actions help to quickly restore the balance and health of the environment.


In August 2008, Supreme Master Ching Hai met with our Association members in a videoconference and expressed her concern about the gas release – which actually is being compounded by multiple sources.

Videoconference with Supreme Master Ching Hai
with Sydney Center, Australia – August 17, 2008

Supreme Master Ching Hai: And also it will melt more ice if the methane coming out from the permafrost, etc, etc. And from the ocean as well and from all the livestock animal raising. And it keeps adding together, and it would stay in the atmosphere for a long time.

Supreme Master Ching Hai: So we have to change it. The quicker we change, the better, and then we can halt the climate change. And we can restore the planet very quickly, in no time. But if we don’t, then the planet will also be destroyed quickly and in no time.

Arctic methane release raises concern for runaway global warming

Arctic methane release raises concern for runaway global warming.

Scientists aboard a Russian research ship along the coast of Siberia recently discovered an extensive oceanic area releasing methane; at amounts 100 times normal for the area.  Scientists believe undersea methane in the Arctic is held in check by frozen permafrost, which is now melting as the Arctic has been rapidly warming. Dr. Örjan Gustafsson of Sweden’s Stockholm University, who was onboard the vessel, stated, “Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface." Methane released into the atmosphere is up to 72 times more potent than CO2 over a 20 year period, and could thus cause accelerated global warming that would be much more difficult to control.

Supreme Master Ching Hai Video Archive:December 25, 2007 - Paris Seminar

We have to save this planet, so that we’ll be able to stay, first. 
Because if the ice all melt, if all the poles all melt out, and then if the sea is warm,
then the gas might be released from the ocean, and we might all be poisoned. It’s a lot of gas.

If you see the Singapore lecture, I already warned that we have to change the way we live, otherwise it’s  too late. It was 10 or 15 years. Or before that, I always talk about how we deforest our planet, yah? Meat eating and all that contributes to a lot of damage to our Earth planet, you know.

Scientists say many things. They are listening now, but I just hope they do it fast.  It just takes action. All the governments in the world really take it now seriously. It’s just I’m worried
the action might be too slow, that’s all. 

Because the ice reflecting the sun, you see, so send it back into the space, but the ice is melting
so fast now, that there’s not enough reflection and because the sea is already warm, it melts the ice. And because the ice melt, the sea warmer. You see what I mean,
the cycle?

The way it is going, if they don’t fix it, 4 or 5 years time, finito. No more. It’s really that urgent.

We are grateful for your advisement of these alarming facts, Dr. Gustafsson and colleagues. We pray for humanity’s response through planet-saving practices such as the plant-based diet to quickly halt these warming trends. 

http://www.independent.co.uk:80/news/science/exclusive-the-methane-time-bomb-938932.html, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080918192943.htm

From CO2 to Climate Change: In-depth with Professor David Archer, PhD in Geophysics

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Recently, more and more scientific research indicates that huge amounts of methane and other greenhouse gases stored in the ocean, permafrost and Arctic tundra are in danger of being released into the atmosphere due to global warming.

In order to learn more about this issue, Supreme Master Television recently interviewed Dr. David Archer who holds a PhD in Geophysics. For the past 15 years, he has been a professor at the University of Chicago in Illinois, USA. Professor Archer is an expert on the subject of the global carbon cycle and specializes in studying ocean sedimentary processes. He teaches classes on global warming, environmental chemistry, and global geochemical cycles.

Dr. Archer has also authored a book on climate changed entitled, Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast. He is in the process of working on another book entitled, From Here to Eternity: Global Warming in Geologic Time. On Planet Earth: Our Loving Home today, we present to you Dr. Archer’s interview with Supreme Master Television.

Supreme Master TV: I know that one area of your research was in methane hydrates. Could you tell us what methane hydrate is and how it can become methane gas?

Dr. David Archer : Methane hydrate is a peculiar form of water ice where the water freezes into a cage like a soccer ball and the methane gas is inside the soccer ball, frozen and trapped in this ice, but if it becomes too warm, then this ice will melt and it can release the methane into the environment.

Supreme Master TV: What would trigger their release?

Dr. David Archer: Warming, from global warming, from rising CO2 concentrations. So carbon dioxide, CO2, is a greenhouse gas and it causes the surface of the earth to warm. This is very well understood. And eventually the warming at the surface can also make the deep ocean get warmer also. Now this takes a long time. If the methane from the hydrates were to escape and actually make it to the atmosphere methane is actually a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is, and so this could lead to stronger warming than we would get just from the carbon dioxide.

Supreme Master TV: How much methane do you think there is stored in the earth?

Dr. David Archer: It’s a huge amount, actually. They measure amounts of carbon in units of a billion metric tons and so there are maybe one hundred or several hundred billion metric tons of carbon as oil and maybe another couple hundred of methane in traditional natural gas reservoirs: If you cook on a stove with gas that comes from a gas well. The largest fossil fuel type is coal and there are maybe five thousand gigatons, a billion metric tons of coal So coal is the largest of the fossil fuel types. But of this methane hydrate in the ocean, there may also be thousands of billion metric tons.

So there’s enough carbon there that it could double the amount of carbon that could ultimately be released into the atmosphere. It’s a huge amount. There’s so much of it that if a fraction of it, say 10%, were somehow to get out into the atmosphere all at once, it would be the same as changing the CO2 concentration by a factor of ten.

Dr. David Archer: If you could just take the earth and give it a shake, the ice that holds the hydrate that holds the methane floats in the water. It’s held at the bottom of the ocean because there’s mud sitting on top of it. But if you just shook everything up,it would float up and so much methane would be released that the climate would completely melt down.

Supreme Master TV: Where would these stores of methane hydrates be located around the earth?

Dr. David Archer: They tend to be just offshore, around the edges of the oceans, so not too deep not out in the middle of the ocean, because there’s not enough methane there to make the hydrates and not too shallow because the pressure isn’t high enough to make the hydrate either. So it’s sort of in middle depths in a ring around the ocean. The Arctic Ocean has more than its share of methane hydrate because the water is colder there so that means that hydrate can be found at shallower depths in the Arctic because the colder water can stabilize the hydrates

So shallower in the ocean means that the warming from global warming can reach that faster than it can everywhere else in the ocean. Also there is thought to be more intense warming in the high latitudes. Alaska and Siberia, it’s warming up there much more than it is here in Chicago because that’s just the way the climate of the earth works, and so the Arctic is the place to be the most interested in methane hydrates and how they might affect the climate.

Supreme Master TV: Speaking of the Arctic, are there methane hydrates in the permafrost soil?

Dr. David Archer: Yes, there are thought to be some methane hydrates in the permafrost but more important in the permafrost is peat, which is frozen organic carbon, you know grass, roots, and things like that. They’ve been frozen for many years, tens of thousands of years but now when they thaw, they decompose and they produce methane and also carbon dioxide.

One way that this happens is in lakes in the tundra in the Arctic, so a lake covering the surface melts down some of the peat underneath it and so you get these methane bubbles that come out very strongly so it’s possible that with more warming could be more lakes and then more methane released into the atmosphere.

Today on Planet Earth: Our Loving Home we have Dr. David Archer, a professor of geophysical sciences from the University of Chicago to discuss with us about climate change.During the 2007 summer ice melt season in the Arctic, the accelerated pace of ice melts greatly alarmed polar researchers in the scientific community.

From 2006 to 2007, they had never witnessed such a drastic reduction in summer ice melt. Furthermore, the disintegration of Antarctica’s Wilkins ice shelf on February 28, 2008, where a huge 406 square kilometers of ice crumbled into the ocean, drew global attention and concern to the rate of climate change exceeding worst case scenarios made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Let’s now hear from Dr. Archer, who clearly defines the importance of the Arctic ice packs in stabilizing our climate.

Dr. David Archer: The sea ice plays a strong role in the climate of reflecting sunlight back out to space and so when you melt that sea ice, the sun shines in the Arctic year round, all 24 hours of the day in the summer time so it’s a lot of sunlight, and so you start absorbing that sunlight and that could change the climate of the Arctic very strongly and that could indirectly affect the methane. And also the Greenland ice sheet and the circulation of the North Atlantic and lots of other things in the high latitudes.

Supreme Master TV: I’m going to venture into asking you what is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air right now and what was it before we noticed that there was global warming going on

Dr. David Archer: The concentration in the year 1750, nobody could measure concentrations then but we have bubbles of ancient air trapped in ice cores so we can measure, we can know that at that time before human activity, the concentration of carbon dioxide was about 280 part per million. So out of a million molecules of air, 280 of them were carbon dioxide.

And today it is about 380 or 385, something like that. Before our period of warm climate in the last ice age, the CO2 concentration in the air was about 200, so going from 200 to 280 was enough to change the climate of the earth from the glacial world when there was two miles of ice over our heads here in Chicago to the interglacial world. So that was 200 to 280 and now we’ve gone all the way to 380. The ice core data that tells us about the value in 1750 or in the ice age now goes back 800,000 years and the CO2 concentration today is much higher than it’s ever been throughout that 800,000 year time period.

Supreme Master TV: So in the history of earth, We’ve had global warming before and we’ve recovered from it and we go into periods of glaciers and then we warm up again. Are we doing that? Do you think this is just another phase of the cycle?

Dr. David Archer: Well, in one sense you are right but in another sense you are using the word “we” and we as human beings have never endured climate changes such as the one that we are now causing before civilization and agriculture all these things happened in a time period of very, very stable climate called the Holocene of the last ten thousand years.

Before that was the glacial time, the glacial climate was much more turbulent and there were strong changes; just a few years the climate would change from one state to another and then back. But the time that civilized man has been in existence, the climate has been very stable and we’re now threatening to leave that stable climate, going into a climate such that we, as a species, have never even seen before.

Supreme Master TV: But this time rather than from volcanic eruptions emitting massive amounts of carbon dioxide, this is human induced, fossil fuel carbon dioxide accumulating.

Dr. David Archer: That’s absolutely right. We can measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and compare that with how much fossil fuel we’re burning and it’s very clear that the carbon dioxide concentration is going up because of human activity, it’s not because of volcanoes or anything like that.

Supreme Master TV: But the consequence would be similar to what we’ve seen in the past. The earth would warm up in a similar way and have similar results.

Dr. David Archer: Yes, there was a climate event 55 million years ago called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event and it’s very unclear exactly what happened but there was some release of carbon dioxide from the earth into the atmosphere fairly quickly within somewhere between instantaneously and ten thousand years; they don’t really know how long it took but the amount of carbon that was released was comparable probably to the amount of coal that we have or the amount of methane hydrates.And then so the earth warmed and then it took 150,000 years for the climate to recover from that which is how long it will take actually for the earth to recover from global warming as well.

Carbon dioxide when you put in the air, it just accumulates in the atmosphere and ocean system and it takes a very long time for that to recover. The earth has mechanisms to stabilize its climate. It’s almost miraculous to imagine but it seems to be true but these mechanisms to stabilize the climate act very slowly; they take hundreds of thousands of years. And so we have it in our powers to change the climate of the earth for a very, very long time.

SUPREME MASTER TV: Is there a certain number a concentration level that once we reach we’ll see catastrophic events?

DR. DAVID ARCHER: I personally think that we’ve already passed a danger limit. The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean in 2007 just crumbled. The amount of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has been decreasing over the years but then in 2007 it just crumbled. And the earthquake activity and the acceleration of the flowing ice in Greenland, I think these are signs that we are already in dangerous territory. Another way to specify or to define, to try to answer your question is to say when we can predict that things are not just possibly dangerous but likely to be harmful.

It’s very difficult to predict but people oftentimes define a dangerous temperature change as 2C warming over the natural level. So far the earth has warmed about 0.7C and even if the CO2 concentration in the air were to stop rising today and just stay at 380 forever, the temperature of the earth would continue to rise to about 1C. If we want to avoid warming more than 2C, we have to freeze the emission of carbon dioxide so industry has to stop growing.

Right now its growth is projected to be twice as fast, twice as much carbon dioxide emitted per year in 50 years as it is now. We need to freeze that and not let it grow, and then in the next couple of decades it has to start going down or else we will exceed a dangerous temperature change of 2C.

2C would be warmer than the earth has been in millions of years, so to try to predict where you would have droughts or whether hurricanes would get much more intense than they are today or whether sea levels could rise by tens of meters, it’s very difficult to make those kinds of predictions because that would be warmer than the earth has been in so long.

SUPREME MASTER TV: Would you say that there’s a certain point of no return if we warmed a certain number of degrees?

DR. DAVID ARCHER: Yes, I think there probably would be a point where the large ice sheets such as the Greenland ice sheet or the west Antarctic ice sheet would start to flow into the ocean and melt, raising the sea level. And it may already be starting; it’s possible. They can see acceleration of the ice, flowing faster than it used to, and they can hear earthquakes in the ice indicating that the ice is flowing faster than it used to. So if the ice sheets start to flow more quickly, that might be a point of no return.

SUPREME MASTER TV: What would the world look like, do you think, if we were to reach that point?

DR. DAVID ARCHER: Well, There have been times in the past like you mentioned before when CO2 concentrations were much higher than today and when there was basically no ice on the planet. So the sea level in such a hothouse world would be about 70 meters higher than today so if you just looked at a map of the earth, it would look different. Florida would be gone, for example, many of the river deltas would flood in such a situation.

It’s called a hothouse world; in a hothouse world there’s much less temperature difference between the equator and the poles so it’s basically almost tropical all the way to the poles. There are alligator teeth, crocodile teeth that they find, fossils in Siberia and in Alaska from these hothouse kinds of worlds. Crocodiles can’t live if it ever gets below freezing so that would be a world that would be tropical all the way to the poles.

But the details of how that climate could work or how many people it could support are difficult to predict, and what’s even harder to predict, actually, is the transition from our relatively cool world to such a world. The forests would all be in the wrong places, so do they just die or do new trees grow in to sort of keep up with the changes in climate? It’s very difficult to prepare for how society could cope with a transition like that.

SUPREME MASTER TV: It does seem like the problem of global warming is pointing us in a new direction where we would have to cooperate more, nations would have to be benevolent towards each other. (Yes) And even individuals would need a change in lifestyle, hopefully for the better.

DR. DAVID ARCHER: I think that’s true, although I think they could change the energy infrastructure so that when you plug something into the wall it comes from a carbon-free energy source. I mean individual virtue is a powerful thing in terms of changing energy use but it’s not going to be enough.

We have to stop building these coal-fired power plants or else all is lost. I feel that the United States should take the lead in making these kinds of changes. And I also feel that we have the resources that we can begin to develop alternative energy technology and then make that available to the rest of the world.

SUPREME MASTER TV: So you would say to the leaders of the government and the policy makers that the time to act is now?

DR. DAVID ARCHER: Yes. The last I heard there were 160 new coal-fired power plants that are being planned or designed or built in the U.S. alone and in China they are building a new coal-fired power plant every week and if they build all those things then all is lost. Those power plants are a crime against humanity is what I would tell the leaders.

SUPREME MASTER TV: Will we see like solar energy or hydrogen energy so that it’s green, so that we have energy that does not generate greenhouse gases at all?

DR. DAVID ARCHER: Yes. That would be much better. Hydrogen isn’t a source of energy; it’s more like a way of storing energy. We have to make hydrogen, so maybe you could use solar cells to split water to make hydrogen and then use hydrogen in a car or whatever, but there’s no place to sort of mine hydrogen exactly so it’s not a primary energy source.

But there’s lots of sunlight; there’s a thousand times more sunlight that hits the earth every day than we actually use in all of our energy production, so if we can start harvesting that efficiently that would solve all of our needs. I’ve read that to supply the United States would require covering about 2% of the land area of the United States, which is about how much area is covered by roads. So it sounds like a lot but if you told somebody a hundred years ago that 2% of the land would be covered by roads they would say that that was a lot too. They would probably say that it was impossible.

SUPREME MASTER TV: Do you stay up nights worrying about global warming?

DR. DAVID ARCHER: Yes, sometimes I do. I feel like we have the technology to avoid global warming. We know of alternative ways of extracting energy from coal, for example, and we’re starting to learn how to build windmills and solar cells and develop energy efficiency. So I don’t think it’s impossible to avoid. I think technologically we know how to do it but this is a more difficult social problem than humankind has ever faced before because it requires global cooperation.

SUPREME MASTER TV: There are two other University of Chicago researchers who have shown that adopting a vegetarian diet is one of the most effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Do you have any comments on their research?

DR. DAVID ARCHER: They looked at this very carefully. It’s very clear that when you grow grain and then feed it to animals and then eat the animals, you lose 90% of the energy from the original grain, and so not only can you feed fewer people on the agriculture that you have but as they discovered, it also requires a lot more fossil-fuel energy to make that happen. It makes that much difference to the CO2 emissions.

Along with the United Nation’s report and many other scientists’ observations, it is clear that adopting a vegetarian diet would be one of the most effective actions an individual can take to help reduce the effects of global warming.We sincerely thank, Dr. David Archer, for your invaluable research in the science of geophysics in providing us with further information on our Earth and the effects of climate change.

Supreme Master Ching Hai on Climate Change:The Solution

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There is solution, only three steps, no? VEGETARIAN, SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, PLANT TREES. How more simple, can it be?

If the government and the media jump in and help and spread all this and say, "It's really urgent, and everybody must do it," then we still have time. Two years. Okay, it's short, but we have time to keep the planet as is. As is. Not as good as before, but as is. And not worse.

They ban cigarettes and it's banned. And they banned drugs, and it's banned. It's not legal. Yeah, and the cigarette reduction now reduce a lot of illness everywhere in the world. People know that. The same with the climate change policy. If they just do what they know is good, then it's very quick. In no time we will recover, or we stop the effect. Because if we don't raise any more cattle or animals, then the Earth will be more sustainable. No more greenhouse gas or methane gas from the animals. No more multiplying all the time. Whatever we have already, we keep it. And no more, raising for profit and meat. Then the Earth will recover.

This is the only important thing right now. First you have to survive and then you can do anything else you want, but if you don’t survive, you don’t have the planet, what's the use? Unless they want to kill their children. If that’s what they decided, what are we going to do?

You see, the gasses are fuming from the ocean and from the land that's been defrosting. It's fuming everywhere. It's just that at the moment, it's not so intense. And then you probably have a headache when you pass by some place, you don't know why suddenly the headache come, and you don't know suddenly your heart hurt, burned. You don’t know why today your liver is no good, and then you take medicine and you forget about it. But it'll be more and more intense if we don't do something. It started long time already. It's just not intensive enough yet, you know, the density. The gas amount is not yet so lethal. Okay, it is lethal to some people in some area where it's more direct, nearby. But most people, they live far away, a little effected or not yet effected. Or very little effect, then they just blame it, "Okay, I ate something bad yesterday, or maybe I drank too much alcohol." And blame it on drinking or food or bad mood, or maybe old age or whatever, don't know that.

Global Warming & Ocean Gas: An Interview with Rice University Prof. Gerald Dickens Part 1

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Global Warming & Ocean Gas: An Interview with Rice University Professor Gerald Dickens

Welcome to Planet Earth: Our Loving Home. In light of growing concerns about climate change and its effects on the planet, Supreme Master Television visited with Dr. Gerald Dickens, associate professor of Earth Science at the prestigious Rice University, located in Houston, Texas, USA.

The private institution has earned respect as a pioneer in the fields of nanotechnology, structural chemical analysis, and space science.

As one of the most widely known and highly regarded universities in the United States, it is often highly ranked in numerous reports. Professor Dickens is a leading researcher into the past history of the world’s oceans, with respect to the changing patterns of their geology, chemistry and biology.

Currently, he serves as the Paleoceanography Editor-in-Chief of the “American Geophysical Union,” the most cited journal in the Earth Sciences field throughout the world. Today, Professor Dickens shares his wealth of knowledge and provides a neutral base for us to discern the relations between global warming and marine geology,and how they affect the future of our planet.

SupremeMasterTV: We are meeting with Professor Gerald Dickens who is professor of Earth Science at Rice University here in Houston, Texas, USA. It’s a pleasure to have you on the program Professor Dickens and our topic of discussion is ocean gas and the potential effect of global warming on this ocean gas.
Can you tell me firstly, what ocean gas are we talking about?

Professor Dickens: Most of it’s methane, and there will be methane that is stored in the sediments at the bottom of the ocean.

SupremeMasterTV: I understand that it’s stored in a crystal form. Can you explain that?

Professor Dickens: Yes. Methane can be both dissolved in water, it can be as gas bubbles or it can be in an unusual structure, what we call methane hydrate. That’s when we take methane molecules and water molecules and then combine together to form a cage, with the methane on the inside.It looks very much like ice.

SupremeMasterTV: And I understand that it’s called “fire in ice.” Can you explain that?

Professor Dickens: Well, because it looks very much like ice, but as it melts it releases methane, which is the same gas that’s used in natural gas for stoves and things like that.So you can imagine if you put a match to it, it looks like a piece of ice with a flame on top.

SupremeMasterTV: Now the next thing is, are we talking about any other gases particularly in the ocean, or is it mainly methane?

Professor Dickens: Well, there is certainly carbon dioxide that’s dissolved in the ocean and that’s a major role, but we don’t usually think of it as in the gas phase there. And so really, the main gas that we’re thinking, in terms of the large amounts of gas in the marine system, is methane.

SupremeMasterTV: Can you tell me how is that methane produced in the oceans? How is it actually produced?

Professor Dickens: Most of it occurs when organic carbon lands on the sea floor. That means things, organisms, when they die, as they fall through the water and land to the bottom of the ocean. As they get buried, various microbes start consuming the organic carbon. And one set of microbes is the Archaea, and a sub-set of the Archaea are the ones that produce methane. So they take various constituents from the original organic carbon and convert it to methane.

SupremeMasterTV: Very interesting, and I understand there’s a whole eco-system in these organisms down there on the ocean floor in the sediment.

Professor Dickens: Yes.

SupremeMasterTV: How does the methane stay in the ocean? What is keeping the methane there?

Professor Dickens: This one’s a little bit complicated to explain. Essentially, it’s always there, but it’s always been added to and it’s leaving. So in other words, as the methane’s being produced, it’s also being consumed. So we end up with a steady state system.

Perhaps the best analogy would be a forest. So, with photosynthesis, we make new organic carbon in trees and as the trees die, they release organic carbon.

The same thing happens in marine sediments. So, as the organic carbon enters the sediment, the Archaea turn it into methane. That methane is now in the sediment but, at the same time, it’s slowly leaking out. And as it leaks out, it gets either consumed by oxygen or another species that’s dissolved in water which we call sulfate. So those are our sort of outputs.

SupremeMasterTV: And can you talk about temperature and water pressure in relationship to methane and hydrates of methane.

Professor Dickens: Sure. In this cycle that we’ve just talked about, as we make methane, if a lot of methane is made and we’re at relatively high pressure caused by the water, and at relatively cold temperatures, such as the bottom of the ocean, then, as we start making the methane, it will precipitate out in this solid clathrate phase that we talked about earlier, where the water and the methane combine to form this cage-like ice structure.

And that will precipitate and clog up the pores in the sediment. So you can imagine a little bit of methane going in, a little bit of methane coming out. But most of the methane in many parts of the world, is stored in the solid phase in the sediment.

SupremeMasterTV: And whereabouts is it distributed? Whereabouts in the ocean floor do we find this methane?

Professor Dickens: Well, in general we sort of need a couple of places. First we need, to get these very large methane deposits where the methane is in the solid phase, we need both cold temperatures and relatively high pressures. We’re talking generally 500 meters or so water depth.

Professor Dickens: For example, if we go out in the middle of the ocean, we have very cold temperatures at the sea floor. The waters are very deep. But there is very little organic carbon reaching the ocean there.

So we don’t see very much methane. In fact, in the middle of parts of the ocean, there is really no methane. However, as we get closer to the continents, we have both organic carbon coming off rivers, as well as we have fairly productive regions.

So you can imagine where this puts it, is on a sort of slope of continental margins, where we have both the input and supply of organic carbon, plus the pressure, plus the temperature.

SupremeMasterTV:The organic carbon is things like what, decomposing organisms or plants or…?

Professor Dickens: The simplest way for the average person to think of it is, a fish dies and it falls to the bottom. But in terms of overall mass, most of it is phytoplankton. So single celled organisms, algae, diatoms, various phytoplankton that live and die and fall down to the bottom of the ocean.

SupremeMasterTV: Is the methane fairly evenly distributed around the world on these continental slopes, or is there more concentration in various areas of the world?

Professor Dickens: It’s clearly distributed in some places more than others. It’s in particular in areas where we’ve had a lot of organic carbon land on the sea floor for quite some time. None of these systems are new. So they take a long time to accumulate very large amounts of methane, we are talking millions of years. So you need a supply of organic carbon for a long time.

There are certain areas where we’ve had this supply, and those are the areas we really find a lot of methane. It’s a little more complicated than that. Part of it is, there are areas around the world that we haven’t really looked, so we don’t know the full distribution. But I think it’s fair to say that it is unevenly distributed. But, in general, we have found it around all continents.

SupremeMasterTV: What are the beneficial effects of methane?

Professor Dickens: Well, I guess it depends who’s benefiting. I mean, certainly, for humans, we like to use methane as natural gas. It’s now a large fraction of the energy, in many countries, is derived off natural gas. And certainly, as we talked about before, you can light methane hydrates or the methane that comes off these materials.So it can be used as an energy source. Certainly, it’s part of the large eco-system that we have just scratched the surface. We don’t really understand this. But this very large, what we call the deep biosphere, this methane’s crucial to that eco-system.

SupremeMasterTV: Coming back now, so the fact that the methane stays sequestered in the ocean as long as the temperatures are cold enough and the depth of the ocean, and there’s enough pressure. So what about warming? How does global warming have the potential effect on this methane sequestered in the oceans?

Professor Dickens: We always have a little bit of methane being formed and a little bit of methane leaving in this large body of methane that's sitting there. However, that large body is sensitive to pressure and temperature and so, what we know, at least in the laboratory, is if we take the solid phase and we either increase the temperature or decrease the pressure, that solid phase goes from the ice-like crystal structure into its constituents, so into water plus gas.

And so what we think happens, and it certainly potentially can happen, is as you warm up marine sediment or decrease the pressure, the solid phase can convert to gas and then you have an over-pressured system, and we think that a lot of gas can come out very fast.

SupremeMasterTV: Coming back now, so the fact that the methane stays sequestered in the ocean as long as the temperatures are cold enough and the depth of the ocean, and there’s enough pressure. So what about warming? How does global warming have the potential effect on this methane sequestered in the oceans?

Professor Dickens: We always have a little bit of methane being formed and a little bit of methane leaving in this large body of methane that's sitting there. However, that large body is sensitive to pressure and temperature and so, what we know, at least in the laboratory, is if we take the solid phase and we either increase the temperature

or decrease the pressure, that solid phase goes from the ice-like crystal structure into its constituents, so into water plus gas.And so what we think happens, and it certainly potentially can happen, is as you warm up marine sediment or decrease the pressure, the solid phase can convert to gas and then you have an over-pressured system, and we think that a lot of gas can come out very fast.

SupremeMasterTV: So what would that do to the world? To the plant life, the human life the planet itself, if a lot of methane gas was released as a result of global warming heating up the oceans? What are the potentials?

Prof. Dickens: Well, the first thing to think about is, where does the methane go? So, if the methane comes out of the sediment there's really sort of two possibilities.

One is it would go into the ocean and be oxidized in the ocean, in which case the methane would be converted to carbon dioxide in the ocean. And probably the most significant effect right off the bat, is acidification. So you drop the pH.

SupremeMasterTV: Yeah, the oceans would become acidic, wouldn’t they?

Prof. Dickens: The second possibility is, of course, you could bubble methane up to the atmosphere. Or, it turns out an interesting phenomenon that we have discovered is that sometimes pieces of hydrate will float, and so they can float up very shallow and then dissociate near the ocean surface.

So, there's ways to get methane into the atmosphere.

Now, there, it turns out, what's interesting with methane, is it's a very potent greenhouse gas, much more potent than CO2. So the net effect of that is to essentially contribute to warming.

SupremeMasterTV: So we're talking about volumes here. How much volume of methane? I've read estimates of anything up to 10 trillion tons of methane in the ocean.

Prof. Dickens: Let's just think about this. I usually think in gigatons and so a gigaton is 1 trillion tons.

SupremeMasterTV: 1 trillion tons.

Prof. Dickens: And so we usually think somewhere on the order of 2,000 to 20,000 gigatons are the sort of estimates for how much methane is stored in the crystal phase, of which again there will be also gas bubbles and dissolved. And so the total system,

we're talking on the order of somewhere on that range of 2,000 to 20,000 gigatons of methane.

SupremeMasterTV: And if that was released into the atmosphere?

Prof. Dickens: Well, I don't think it would be ever possible to release it all, but even if a fraction of thathttp://www.suprememastertv.comhttp://www.suprememastertv.com We can think about, for example, what humans are doing today. So probably, you know, if we burned all the fossil fuels that are available today, somewhere on the order of 4,000 gigatons of carbon that will be added to the atmosphere.

So you can imagine that if 10,000 gigatons of methane - an average number for estimates that people have made…If one-tenth of that goes, you know, we are on the order of magnitude of what we are doing today, in terms of adding carbon dioxide.

SupremeMasterTV: So is methane toxic to humans?

Prof. Dickens: Certainly, if the entire atmosphere around you is methane, it is toxic.

SupremeMasterTV: There's no oxygen to breathe.

Prof. Dickens: But small amounts of methane are not going to be toxic, but certainly it's flammable so it's not a good idea to have lots of methane.

SupremeMasterTV: Has this ever happened in the past, where a lot of methane gas has been released into the atmosphere on Earth?

Prof. Dickens: We think so. We are very confident that there are times in the past where large amounts of carbon dioxide go into the ocean and / or atmosphere very quickly. We think that the source of that carbon dioxide is oxidized methane. So that methane has come into the system and either by mixing with oxygen in the ocean or through various reactions in the atmosphere, it converted to CO2.

SupremeMasterTV: And when did this happen?

Prof. Dickens: Probably the best studied of these times is about 55 million years ago, right after the Paleocene-Eocene boundary. And it's an interesting time, in that we see all sorts of environmental consequences. So something clearly happened.

In fact, that's why we have a boundary there, because the organisms on life changed quite dramatically across this time period. And we see things such as over 6, 7 degree warming around the world, including the high latitudes. We see changes in the hydrologic cycle, so some places become very dry, some places become very wet. We see ocean acidification. We see changes in oxygen content in the ocean. So many, many different environmental changes occurred during this time.

SupremeMasterTV: Has this ever happened in the past, where a lot of methane gas has
been released into the atmosphere on Earth?

Prof. Dickens: We think so. We are very confident that there are times in the past where large amounts of carbon dioxide go into the ocean and / or atmosphere very quickly. We think that the source of that carbon dioxide is oxidized methane.

So that methane has come into the system and either by mixing with oxygen in the ocean or through various reactions in the atmosphere, it converted to CO2.

SupremeMasterTV: And when did this happen?

Prof. Dickens: Probably the best studied of these times is about 55 million years ago, right after the Paleocene-Eocene boundary. And it's an interesting time, in that we see all sorts of environmental consequences. So something clearly happened. In fact, that's why we have a boundary there, because the organisms on life changed quite dramatically across this time period.

And we see things such as over 6, 7 degree warming around the world, including the high latitudes. We see changes in the hydrologic cycle, so some places become very dry, some places become very wet. We see ocean acidification. We see changes in oxygen content in the ocean. So many, many different environmental changes occurred during this time.

SupremeMasterTV: What happened to the animal life then? What happened to the plant life? Is there evidence what happened to them?

Prof. Dickens: Well, it’s interesting. So if you look at organisms in the bottom of the ocean, many of them seem to go extinct. So life was not too good at the bottom of the ocean. On land, it's a much different sort of response and, you know, looks like organisms migrate. And so we see just the distribution of organisms change very, very fast.

Prof. Dickens: If we go into the north pole and drill a hole there and collect the sediment that was deposited there 55 million years ago, it looks like temperatures somewhere in the 70 degrees, although we're not totally sure whether those are summer temperatures or annual temperatures. Nonetheless it's still quite warm.

SupremeMasterTV: Very interesting. And we are thinking that methane was probably the reason at that time, is that right?

Prof. Dickens: Somehow… we think that methane is some component of this. And what we're not sure is whether it's essentially the trigger or a feedback.

SupremeMasterTV: We were talking also about what can we do to help with global warming?

Prof. Dickens: As far as methane, in terms of global warming, probably, certainly over the next 100 or 200 years these methane reservoirs in the deep ocean are probably not responsive at that sort of time scale. On the other hand, if we go to up to permafrost regions, yes, we can get methane coming out from the permafrost, which may act as a feedback.

So as we start melting permafrost we release extra methane As far global warming, that is just a huge problem. I can give you my own personal opinions. I think it’s going to take a radical view of a change in lifestyle, as well as new technologies. And it’s really going to take a combination of both.

There are all sorts of these feedbacks, and many of them we don’t really fully understand. So, for example, there’s a paper, just a couple weeks ago, summarizing recent evidence that as you start warming things up, the biosphere, the plants start releasing more carbon than they take in.

So when you start doing things, they start taking in carbon, but then they start kicking it back out. So it’s like, gosh! That’s a feedback that’s really problematic. That’s not in our models. And there are many of these things that we just really don’t understand right now.

SupremeMasterTV: I remember, in reading the papers, you were saying that the carbon in the methane is actually like a huge capacitor that people haven’t really worked into their thinking, and to do with the carbon cycle.

Prof. Dickens: The carbon cycle. If you think of three boxes, it’s the easiest way to think of the carbon cycle. You have an atmosphere, a biosphere and the ocean.

Prof. Dickens: Biosphere, trees, plants; so the terrestrial biosphere. And all of these
are connected. So you think of three boxes, much like, I like to think of it as a swimming pool and 2 hot tubs. And so between each one of these boxes there are inputs and outputs. In the analogy between the swimming pool and the hot tub, it’s essentially the ocean is the big box. And it’s a common misconception for the average person, they think that all the carbon is in trees.

But it turns out that most of the carbon, about 93% of it, is in the ocean, not in trees or in the atmosphere. So what’s happening right now is we’re adding a lot of carbon to the atmosphere. It’s coming in much faster than it can go into the biosphere or into the ocean. So that’s why the CO2 is going up very, very quickly.But it turns out, that if you suddenly realize there is a lot of methane on the planet, somewhere there is now a 4th box.

So you can’t have an ocean that’s nominally 35,000 gigatons and then suddenly talk about methane being 10 or 20,000 gigatons. There’s another box in the system. So the simplest way to think about it is a capacitor. You have organic carbon. The normal way people think of the carbon cycle is, you have a little bit of carbon coming into the system, through volcanoes or through weathering, and a little bit of carbon coming out of the system. So you have this large box, a little bit of input and a little bit of output and the carbon cycle in between all this. And then, essentially by adding methane, what you have to say is, some portion of the organic carbon leaving the system then gets converted to methane, so you add a new box. Then a little bit leaks out and it goes back into the ocean.

The idea for the capacitor is that output can change dramatically in the time frame. Sometimes we can have a lot of methane come out very quickly.

SupremeMasterTV: With the temperature change.

Prof. Dickens: With the temperature change.

SupremeMasterTV: And the pressure change.

Prof. Dickens: Yeah.

SupremeMasterTV: Is there any other comments, anything else that you think the general public should know?

Prof. Dickens: The fantastic thing is, I think I mentioned to you earlier today, is that 15 years ago, I don’t think anyone would have even asked me. I just sort of did my own thing and studied methane and climate change. Now people are actually interested.

SupremeMasterTV: That’s a very important topic, very important. Well it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the program, Professor Dickens. Thank you so very much for granting us this interview.

Prof. Dickens: Well thank you for having me.

We sincerely thank Dr. Dickens for sharing this discussion on the current studies of links between ocean gas and global warming. We sincerely wish you all the best in your endeavors to further our understanding in this very important area of research.

SOS Climate Change