Climate at risk - Canada retreates while Russia finds giant Methane bubbles

[auroraglacialis]

Just after Canda has retreated from the Kyoto Protocol, because it "impairs the countries "development"" (meaning they want to become the next Saudia Arabia by increasing the destruction of the tar sands), we get this:

Shock as retreat of Arctic sea ice releases deadly greenhouse gas - Climate Change - Environment - The Independent

"In a very small area, less than 10,000 square miles, we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed," Dr Semiletov said. "We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale – I think on a scale not seen before. Some plumes were a kilometre or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere – the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal."
Dr Semiletov released his findings for the first time last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
...
One of the greatest fears is that with the disappearance of the Arctic sea-ice in summer, and rapidly rising temperatures across the entire region, which are already melting the Siberian permafrost, the trapped methane could be suddenly released into the atmosphere leading to rapid and severe climate change.

Methane clathrates - methane ice locked under the ocean floor is thought to be the worlds most dangerous climate feedback loop. As icecaps melt and oceans warm, that frozen methane is thought to be released, increasing methane in the atmosphere and increasing the greenhouse conditions. Methane is 20 times as potent for global warming than CO2. A couple of outbursts of methane have been found before, but the scale of this seems to be a lot larger than anything before.

These buggers are a kilometer in diameter!