Independent: A cruise outside the AGU press room finds a disturbing report on Arctic methane bubbles
Last week while covering the annual American Geophysics Union meeting in San Francisco, award-winner (this year’s David Perlman breaking news sci journalism prize) Steve Connor leaned over to a companion and said “hey, I got a great story today.” He’d escaped the confines of the (fine) AGU press room to scout a posters session in a vast room on the other side of the big Moscone Convention Center’s multi-building complex, there ran into some Russian researchers he’d talked with for previous news, and bingo. They had something, and he had it exclusively. He said it’d be up this week, and the nice graphic map with it shows the time was well spent. Just goes to show, again, that sitting in by distant digital link on press conferences is better than nothing, but being at a meeting via one’s corporeal self is even better.
- Independent (UK) Steve Connor: Shock as retreat of arctic sea ice releases deadly greenhouse gases ; Plus op-ed: Leading Article: Arctic methane: a risk it would be unwise to ignore ;
A few other outlets picked up Connor’s piece, or spring-boarded their own stories from it.
- New Zealand Herald: Rapid rise in Arctic methane shocks scientists;
- Yale e360: Huge Methane Plumes Are Discovered in Arctic Ocean ;
Speaking of bubbling methane, I am bubbling with methane questions that this story raises. This is methane from the sea floor, it says here, from continental shelves. Recently we’ve seen news on Arctic methane due to permafrost melt – but mainly up on the dry land’s tundra. That methane is being,as far as I know, created metabolically as microbial decomposition of plant-remains generates it, as well as CO2. Connor’s latest story’s methane, one presumes, arises from decomposition of a different sort. That would be the chemical dissociation of methane clathrates or hydrates, ice-like matrices of CH4 and H2O common in cold seabeds. A scoop is a scoop and Connor has a good one. One or two sentences on what this methane is and whether it is distinct from the kind feared from thawing, terrestrial permafrost would have anwered the question. Another small one: Connor’s source refers to the methane plumes as torch-like structures. That evokes images of flames (most of the story’s terms, such as plumes and bubbles, inspire correct visions). One may assume that this methane is not on fire, at least not usually. Plus methane is not, one suspects, a particularly deadly greenhouse gas – not as in fall-over gasping and turning blue at the concentrations as issue here. Reporters seldom write the headlines on newspaper stories. That is likely the case here.
- Charlie Petit
December 22nd, 2011 at 1:15 pm
The word “torch” was a direct quote from the researcher, who was presumably thinking in Russian and translating. I’m no Russian speaker myself, but a poke around various Russian-to-English dictionaries suggests that the Russian word could be any of the following:
ГОРЕЛКА (torch in the sense of a gas burner or gas jet)
СВЕТОЧ (torch in the sense of a lamp or flashlight)
ФАКЕЛ (torch in the sense of a flaming brand)
Of these, the first seems the most plausible, so I think “gas jet” would be a reasonable substitution in context.