Russian Scientist Discovers Giant Arctic Methane Plumes

Nothing I see in that article suggests that this is a new phenomenon...aside from the hyperbolic statements of the scientists.

The author is astonishingly remiss in not asking the obvious question: did this just start? It could be that such methane plumes have existed forever, we just never detected them. This is the EIGHTH such cruise/survey. They should be able to conclusively say "we checked this area in at least one or two previous instances and such seeps weren't observed", no?

It seems logical that there must have been plumes like this for a while, to prompt (and justify) such a large-scale survey.

Yet both the scientists and article author seem to gloss over the fact that "never seen before" != "never happened before".

In fact, Igor Semiletov's team has been conducting this survey annually for some time now. From the article:

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.

And they have seen this phenomenon in prior years - just not on anything like the scale of methane release they observed this year. Again, from the article:

"Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing," Dr Semiletov said.

Don't blame the scientist. Don't blame the journalist. Blame the reader, for not reading the story.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/qJsd7BLiN-0/russian-scientist-discovers-giant-arctic-methane-plumes

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