Natural Gas is on the Move Under Permafrost

Deep under the surface of an Arctic landscape known as Svalbard, there is a massive amount of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. New research reported in Frontiers in Earth Science has shown that this methane can move around underneath the permafrost that is trapping it, and it can escape. If there is a sudden, large release of methane from these repositories, the levels of methane in the atmosphere could spike, which would feed into a cycle in which more warming kept causing the release of more methane, causing more warming, and so on.

The study…