This hissing, bubbling Alaska lake is frightening lying "global warming" scientists

[But...the models...]

ABOVE THE ARCTIC CIRCLE, ALASKA - Katey Walter Anthony has
studied some 300 lakes across the tundras of the Arctic. But
sitting on the mucky shore of her latest discovery, the Arctic
expert said she’d never seen a lake like this one.

Set against the austere peaks of the western Brooks Range, the
lake, about 20 football fields in size, looked like it was
boiling. Its waters hissed, bubbled and popped as a powerful
greenhouse gas escaped from the lake bed. Some bubbles grew as
big as grapefruits, visibly lifting the water’s surface several
inches and carrying up bits of mud from below.

This was methane.

As the permafrost thaws across the fast-warming Arctic, it
releases carbon dioxide, the top planet-warming greenhouse gas,
from the soil into the air. Sometimes, that thaw spurs the
growth of lakes in the soft, sunken ground, and these deep-
thawing bodies of water tend to unleash the harder-hitting
methane gas.

But not this much of it. This lake, which Walter Anthony dubbed
Esieh Lake, looked different. And the volume of gas wafting from
it could deliver the climate system another blow if lakes like
this turn out to be widespread.

The first time Walter Anthony saw Esieh Lake, she was afraid it
might explode - and she is no stranger to the danger, or the
theatrics, of methane. In 2010, the University of Alaska
Fairbanks posted a video of the media-savvy ecologist standing
on the frozen surface of an Arctic lake, then lighting a methane
stream on fire to create a tower of flame as tall as she is. It
got nearly half a million views on YouTube.

So now, in the Arctic's August warmth, she had come back to this
isolated spot with a small research team, along with her husband
and two young sons, to see what secrets Esieh Lake might yield.
Was it simply a bizarre anomaly? Or was it a sign that the
thawing Arctic had begun to release an ancient source of methane
that could worsen climate change?

[Ice returned to the Northwest Passage this summer, forcing
cruise lines to change course]

One thing she was sure of: If the warming Arctic releases more
planet-warming methane, that could lead to. . . more warming.
Scientists call this a feedback loop.

"These lakes speed up permafrost thaw," Walter Anthony said.
"It's an acceleration."

There was only so much the team would learn from the instruments
they had hauled here. To get a firsthand look, they would have
to get in.

They'd brought their wet suits.

Graduate student Janelle Sharp accompanied researcher Katey
Walter Anthony to Esieh Lake. The team brought shotguns as
protection against grizzly bears, which frequent the area.
(Washington Post photo by Jonathan Newton)
Graduate student Janelle Sharp accompanied researcher Katey
Walter Anthony to Esieh Lake. The team brought shotguns as
protection against grizzly bears, which frequent the area.
(Washington Post photo by Jonathan Newton)
Arctic lakes that don’t freeze
Walter Anthony, who grew up close to Lake Tahoe, was captivated
by Arctic lakes at 19, when she spent a summer at Siberia’s
picturesque Lake Baikal.

"I love the solitude of remote lakes and the mystery of what
lies beneath the water surface."

Two decades and several academic degrees later, she was asked by
a Native Alaskan group, the NANA Regional Corporation, to search
for methane seeps in northwest Alaska, since the gas, despite
its climate downsides, could provide a fuel source for remote
communities.

How do you find a lake in Alaska that leaks methane? Well,
there's one telltale sign: They don't fully freeze over.

In April 2017, Walter Anthony put out word among residents of
Kotzebue that she was looking for weird lakes. An email that
month from a pilot led her to the Noatak region, not far above
the Arctic Circle. Last September, she made her first visit to
the lake - set against sloping hills covered with rust-colored
mosses and blueberry bushes. She brought her family and a
graduate student to the spot, so remote it required several days
of camping and was completely off the grid.

At first, the sheer volume of gases at Esieh Lake was slightly
terrifying, but as Walter Anthony grew accustomed to the lake's
constant spluttering, her fear gave way to wonder.

Frederic Thalasso, of the Center for Research and Advanced
Studies at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico, uses a
gas analyzer at Esieh Lake. (Washington Post photo by Jonathan
Newton)
Frederic Thalasso, of the Center for Research and Advanced
Studies at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico, uses a
gas analyzer at Esieh Lake. (Washington Post photo by Jonathan
Newton)
Her sounding devices picked up huge holes in the bottom of the
lake. Pockmarks, she called them, “unlike anything I’ve ever
seen in any Arctic lake.”

Most of Esieh is quite shallow, averaging only a little over
three feet deep. But where the gas bubbles cluster, the floor
drops suddenly, a plunge marked by the vanishing of all visible
plant life.

Measurements showed that the lake dips to about 50 feet deep in
one area and nearly 15 feet in another. When they first studied
them, Walter Anthony and her graduate student Janelle Sharp
named these two seep clusters W1 and W2, short for "Wow 1" and
"Wow 2."

The next discovery came from the lab.

When the scientists examined samples of the gases, they found
the chemical signature of a "geologic" origin. In other words,
the methane venting from the lake seemed to be emerging not from
the direct thawing of frozen Arctic soil, or permafrost, but
rather from a reservoir of far older fossil fuels.

If that were happening all over the Arctic, Walter Anthony
figured - if fossil fuels that had been buried for millennia
were now being exposed to the atmosphere - the planet could be
in even deeper peril.

Philip Hanke pulls the boat carrying scientific supplies
through a narrow passage. (Washington Post photo by Jonathan
Newton)
Philip Hanke pulls the boat carrying scientific supplies through
a narrow passage. (Washington Post photo by Jonathan Newton)
Deeper peril
For the second trip, Walter Anthony had brought a larger team of
researchers, more equipment and her family - her husband, Peter
Anthony, and sons, Jorgen, 6, and Anders, 3.

The team brought instruments for sampling gases, four inflatable
boats, large crates of food, eight tents, a satellite phone for
emergencies, and two shotguns. As with much of the Alaskan
wilderness, the lake is frequented by grizzly bears, and the
bear scat around the camp kept everyone keenly aware of their
surroundings.

A week before the trip, Walter Anthony had published a major
study delivering worrisome news about Arctic lakes in general.
Her husband - also a scientist at the University of Alaska
Fairbanks - was a co-author.

[The Arctic is full of toxic mercury, and climate change is
going to release it]

The research tackled the central question now animating
scientists who study permafrost soils, which can reach depths of
nearly 5,000 feet and were laid down over tens of thousands of
years or more as generations of plants died and sank beneath the
surface. Because of the cold, those carbon-rich remains never
fully decomposed, and the soil preserves them in an icy
purgatory. Now, though, as the Arctic warms, decomposition is
starting up - and it gives off greenhouse gases.

Scientists know the permafrost contains an enormous amount of
carbon - enough to catastrophically warm the planet if it were
all released into the atmosphere. But they don't know how fast
it can come out and whether changes will be gradual or rapid.

That's where Walter Anthony's work came in.

Research technician Philip Hanke moves a measuring chamber that
records greenhouse gas fluctuations. (Washington Post photo by
Jonathan Newton)
Research technician Philip Hanke moves a measuring chamber that
records greenhouse gas fluctuations. (Washington Post photo by
Jonathan Newton)
The authors examined the prevalence of thermokarst lakes, which
form when the wedges of ice within permafrost melt and create
voids that then fill with water. And they found that the
continuing growth of these lakes - many of which have already
formed in the tundra - could more than double the greenhouse gas
emissions coming from the Arctic’s soils by 2100. That’s despite
the fact that the lakes would cover less than 6 percent of the
total Arctic land surface.

Scientists have been puzzling over a dramatic spike in
atmospheric methane levels, which since 2006 have averaged 25
million tons more of the gas per year. Walter Anthony's study
found that Arctic lakes could more than double this increase as
well.

Overall, if Walter Anthony's findings are correct, the total
impact from thawing permafrost could be similar to adding a
couple of large fossil-fuel-emitting economies - say, two more
Germanys - to the planet. And that does not take into account
the possibility of more lakes like Esieh, which appears to be a
different phenomenon from thermokarst lakes, emitting gases
faster.

The landscape around Esieh Lake itself bears the mark of rapid
thermafrost thaw.

Along the shore, a large section of the hillside had collapsed,
a change that, according to two members of the team, had
occurred just since May, when they were last here.

This "thaw slump" was a textbook example of fast-moving
permafrost thaw. It had left behind an exposed wall of muddy ice
and small islands of peat and mosses.

Frederic Thalasso takes gas samples from the lake via boat.
(Washington Post photo by Jonathan Newton)
Frederic Thalasso takes gas samples from the lake via boat.
(Washington Post photo by Jonathan Newton)
“It’s kind of freaky”
If it weren’t for the bubbles, the large patches of silty water
they create and the slightly unsettling fact that you could
light the emerging gases on fire (at one point, Walter Anthony
did just that), Esieh Lake might be an idyllic scene. But these
features, combined with the fact that it appears to be
frequented by grizzly bears, render it more alien than bucolic.

But Walter Anthony and her research technician Philip Hanke, 25,
were determined to explore it from within. On the second day of
the trip, they donned wet suits and snorkels and plunged into
the cold water, which was below 60 degrees.

They wanted to see the methane seeps up close and learn what
they could by swimming among the bubbles.

Hanke went first, venturing into the more vigorous bubble site,
Wow 2. There was very little visibility. But, groping in the
darkness, Hanke could feel the shape of things.

"It's kind of freaky," he reported after he surfaced. "Right
where the hole goes in, it slopes, and it's flattened out, and
it coned back down, and that was where some really loose
sediment was, and I could stick my hands into it."

"So there's different ledges, you're saying?" Walter Anthony
asked.

"Yeah, it was a ledge."

The second, much deeper site was less murky, more peaceful.
Walter Anthony was still in awe when she came up for air.

"You're just looking down into this stream of bubbles coming up
right into your face, and they're so soft they go all around
you," she said. "And the sunlight's on them. It's like out of
this world but under this world."

Another scientist, Frederic Thalasso, had traveled from Mexico
City and spent days taking gas measurements around the lake. His
initial results: Emissions from Esieh were very high - and
clearly had something to do with fossil fuels.

The lakes where he had witnessed similar bubbling activity were
in the tropics and polluted - ideal conditions for the
production of methane, said Thalasso, a scientist with the
Center for Research and Advanced Studies at the National
Polytechnic Institute in Mexico.

But those lakes have gas flows that are "probably 100 times
lower than in this lake," he said.

His instruments also detected ethane, butane and propane -
classic signatures of a fossil origin.

Later, after processing his data, he produced an initial
estimate that the lake was producing two tons of methane gas
every day - the equivalent of the methane gas emissions from
about 6,000 dairy cows (one of the globe's biggest methane
sources). That's not enough to be a big climate problem on its
own, but if there are many more lakes like this one - well,
that's another story.

Peter Anthony dries clothes by the fire after a full day in the
field. (Washington Post photo by Jonathan Newton)
Peter Anthony dries clothes by the fire after a full day in the
field. (Washington Post photo by Jonathan Newton)
A troubling hybrid
After four nights of camping, the team packed up to make the two-
hour boat trip to Kotzebue, the first leg on the journey home.
Walter Anthony wouldn’t have all the new data processed for a
while, but she did have a pretty good hypothesis about what is
happening at Esieh Lake.

Permafrost contains a lot of carbon - but in some locations,
permafrost soil, and its characteristic wedges of embedded ice,
also sits atop ancient reserves of fossil fuels, including
methane gas. So as the Arctic warms - which it is doing twice as
fast as the rest of the Earth - these gases could be liberated
into the atmosphere.

The holes in the bottom of Esieh Lake could therefore be an
underwater cousin of odd craters that have appeared in the
Siberian tundra in recent years, suspected to have been caused
by underground gas explosions.

If this is right, then Esieh Lake becomes a kind of hybrid - and
a worrying one.

It's not a pure thermokarst lake, though some thermokarst
appears to be forming around the lake's expanding edges, tipping
shoreline trees as the ice in the permafrost melts and the
ground destabilizes. But the thawing of permafrost at the lake
bed might also have unleashed older fossil gases from a reserve
that had been sealed - creating another kind of worrisome lake.

"This is an additional source," Walter Anthony said.

Carolyn Ruppel, who leads the Gas Hydrates Project at the U.S.
Geological Survey, said Walter Anthony's theory makes sense.
Permafrost thawing could indeed release ancient fossil fuels in
areas where they intersect.

A breakfast of cranberries and blueberries picked fresh from
the tundra at Esieh Lake in northwestern Alaska. (Washington
Post photo by Jonathan Newton)
A breakfast of cranberries and blueberries picked fresh from the
tundra at Esieh Lake in northwestern Alaska. (Washington Post
photo by Jonathan Newton)
But it would take more study to prove that this phenomenon is
leading to widespread emissions across the Arctic, she cautioned.

Nobody knows how long ago the seeps started bubbling or what the
trigger was.

From a scientific perspective, the fact that these lakes are
emitting methane rather than carbon dioxide does have an
admittedly limited upside.

Methane hits the atmosphere hard and fast and then mostly
dissipates after a decade or two - far different from carbon
dioxide, which is less potent but lingers for centuries or even
millennia. So while methane impedes climate progress and amps up
the planet's immediate temperature, it does not leave the same
long-term legacy.

Meanwhile, some scientists say they're not sure yet how bad
Arctic lakes will be for the climate or whether they will indeed
cause emissions from permafrost to double.

“It’s not the final number,” said Vladimir Romanovsky, one of
Walter Anthony’s colleagues at the University of Alaska
Fairbanks and a noted permafrost expert.

At this point, it would be premature to call Esieh Lake a sign
of climate doom. It is a strange and dramatic site, but its
message remains partly veiled.

The coming years will probably reveal what's behind Esieh and
whether it has many cousins across the top of the world.

By then, we may also see whether the Arctic’s great thaw will
have thwarted attempts to stop global warming.

https://www.adn.com/arctic/2018/09/24/across-the-arctic-lakes-
are-leaking-dangerous-greenhouse-gases/