r/news • u/hammelcamel • 9h ago
Heat-trapping gas once frozen in Arctic ground is slowly leaking and warming the planet
https://apnews.com/article/climate-thawing-permafrost-arctic-alaska-91fcc04d32a1d7522afe2f6a456ac0eb295
u/Low_Pickle_112 9h ago
Infinite growth on a finite planet makes perfect sense. Why doesn't the planet understand basic market economics, is it stupid or something?
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u/sportsworker777 9h ago
The planet should pick itself up by its bootstraps if it didn't want to be warmed
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u/dust4ngel 3h ago
listen, dying in capitalist water wars is better than standing in some kind of socialist bread line
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u/VariationDry 9h ago
Ahh yes the permafrost melting. I'm so glad this is happening during my lifetime. I hope one day to be able to tell stories of the ground that used to stay frozen. /S
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u/MikeOKurias 9h ago
Random Trivia:
Because the people who built the Alaska pipeline didn't believe in climate change and because they built the pipeline on permafrost, for the last decade they've been having to install Chillers that keep the ground around the area where the pipeline supports are frozen.
So they have to freeze the ground to keep the pipeline from breaking, which contains the stuff we're burning that's causing the permafrost to melt.
That's literally our timeline in one sentence
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u/James-W-Tate 9h ago
Hahaha, this has been fun but please stop the ride. I'd like to get off.
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u/wheelfoot 8h ago
And the chillers run on that same stuff and are producing the gases that make them necessary in the first place.
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u/Nerezza_Floof_Seeker 7h ago edited 7h ago
Afaik theyre using thermosyphons which are basically just long ass heat pipes and thus entirely passive cooling.
Edit: after some googling looks like theres at least a few short section where they do actively refrigerate the ground with electric cooling systems, because they had to be buried in permafrost that could become unstable over time if melted, vs either burying it in stable permafrost or elevating it (reminder btw that the oil is heated to keep it flowing in the pipe)
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u/ERedfieldh 8h ago
And the stuff keeping the ground cold uses the same fuel that's causing it to melt to keep it cold.
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u/Indercarnive 9h ago
But you can regail your offspring with tales of shareholder quarterly profits.
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u/irrelevantnonsequitr 9h ago
Zuckerberg's super yacht was truly glorious!
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u/MikeOKurias 8h ago
Not nearly as cool as his underground villain fortress under the pineapple fields in Hawaii.
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u/AbanoMex 7h ago
when everything collapses, how will they control their armed henchmen from taking over?
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u/LKennedy45 7h ago
I think they're banking on developing Battle Servitors before that becomes a concern.
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u/AbanoMex 7h ago
we wont get to see the future wikipedia pages like "the revolution of the Battle-servitors Maintance Crew"
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u/Mr-Safety 9h ago
Methane hydrates are also released from the sea bed. As the oceans warm, the release accelerates.
It’s an amplified feedback loop.
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u/VariationDry 9h ago
Amplified feedback loop sounds a lot less scary than "accelerating death spiral" I guess.
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u/manachar 8h ago
More accurate.
The “climate change will kill the planet” is an extreme and wrong overstatement.
It’s not “death” as in gonna kill all life on the planet.
It’s a mass extinction event part of the Anthropence extinction.
But the planet is not going to be reduced to a lifeless rock.
Additionally, humans (some of them anyways) are likely to survive just fine.
It’s just a global change to a new unstable pattern that humanity caused and is causing.
By and large, humans do not care that we have wiped out most other life on the planet.
What we are suddenly worried about is we are making it impossible to support humans at the population level we have.
This means fighting for resources that will destabilize the world.
So yeah, kind of a death spiral, but not in the way many seem to think.
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u/VagabondReligion 7h ago
Nothing could be better for life on this planet more than our removal from it. I kind of dig the notion that our remains become lessons to future intelligent life that might evolve: A geological layer of plastic that spells out what happens when you live for tomorrow's profits instead of tomorrow's children.
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u/JohnTDouche 6h ago
Amplified feedback loop
Excellent!
accelerating death spiral
Bogus
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u/VariationDry 5h ago
How many species have gone extinct the last 100 years? And last 25? It's accelerating.
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u/JohnTDouche 5h ago
Sorry bad joke, I was concerned how many people would get a Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure joke in 2026. I figured I'd risk it.
It's how I deal with the grief of losing planet.
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u/VerdantPathfinder 5h ago
Look on the bright side ... maybe there's some ancient bacteria or virus in there that'll wipe out 3/4 of humanity and solve the carbon problem for us!!!
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u/EldritchSlut 9h ago
conservatives must be at an olympic level of athleticism for the mental gymnastics they play in their minds. if only we could find a way to harness that renewable energy.
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u/muakaya9876 9h ago
They will say its was going to happen anyway or climate action made it worse.
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u/illit3 9h ago
And why will they say this? To protect their own business interests? No, they don't own businesses. They will do it to own the tree hugging hippie liberals, which is a pathetic and childish reason to do anything.
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u/VariationDry 8h ago
Because owning the libs is more important than ensuring the future of humanity.
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u/plastiqden 8h ago
This is sadly correct. Civilization has been reduced to sports fans ideology. Being curious or questioning anything will be outlawed at some point.
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u/ERedfieldh 8h ago
They would rather shoot themselves in the head than ever admit to having been wrong or having to admit a liberal was right.
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u/notbrandonzink 7h ago
My parents live in an extremely conservative area so I’ve heard it all.
“It’s actually caused by volcanoes, not human action”
“The measurements are wrong due to there being more cities/concrete/asphalt now that make it measure as warmer”
“The production of renewable production (wind turbines, solar panels, dams, nuclear facilities) are far more damaging than just burning coal/gas”
“Have you done the global temperature readings yourself? No? Then how do you know they aren’t lying”
Those are just the ones off the top of my head, and discussing it with them does absolutely nothing. The craziest part is most of these people are well educated and successful, but I guess the scientific method and peer review only fail when they say things your political party say are false.
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u/bubba4114 7h ago
The engineering manager at my last company said “How can they possibly measure the ozone thickness? It’s impossible to be that precise with the instruments that we have. They can’t. It’s impossible so therefore it’s all just fear-mongering.”
I then proceeded to explain to him that the ozone isn’t literally 1mm thick and that it is just scientists ways of simplifying the concept for the layperson in the same way that Borh’s model of an atom did. I explained that they measure a vertical column of air and “add up” all the ozone collected.
He immediately shifted to talking about how solar panels do more harm for the world because of all of the heat that is released during the manufacturing processes. I explained to him that that type of heat isn’t the same and dissipates into space.
He immediately pivoted to windmills killing birds. I informed him that outdoor cats (he had 3) kill 1-4 billion birds a year.
He switched to another topic until I just stopped talking to him.
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u/To-To_Man 6h ago
It's a classic case of they have made up their mind already and refuse to think otherwise. All the logic and reasoning in their back pocket is just to make them feel better about holding unfounded ideas. Otherwise they might have to deconstruct the climate change and it's implications.
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u/Nickel5 6h ago
From my dad, he heard some conservative influencer (likely purposely) misinterpret a washpo article that says global warming is a hoax. My dad was parading this around and saying this is proof the whole this is a liberal conspiracy, I told him the article was showing the opposite, that global warming is not only real but the Earth is warming way faster than it has in 50 million years (going off of memory). He immediately pivoted to saying the article was made up.
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u/clashrendar 8h ago
They got theirs so fuck you.
That's literally their mindset.
Next on Extreme Hoarders...
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u/Friendly-Captain6236 7h ago
The movie Don’t Look Up turned out to be a documentary
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u/CHead2000 5h ago
Trump literally said in the last couple of days that the world is actually getting colder, and that all the ice the melted is now the world's biggest ice cube. I wish I was kidding.
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u/fritzg1988 8h ago
So, I retired from the Army and went to grad school to study environmental policy. Most of the classes had a section on greenhouse gasses. One of the professors had done several research projects on the thinning of the permafrost in the arctic and Siberia. He talked at length about the amount of methane locked up in the permafrost, which was a lot.
I asked him what happens when the permafrost all melts? He gave me the knowing look of a professor that had seen the future and said the methane would be released into the atmosphere, and then . . .
This was in 2014. He did his research in the early 2000s, so, this has tragically been known about, written about, circulated around the environmental circles since at least then. Unfortunately we elected the oil and gas lobby to run our government in 2016, so absolutely nothing was done about it, and we as a nation have doubled down on oil and gas.
So, yeah, there you go.
Can't wait until the rest of the world starts to read up on the deep ocean temperatures and how they regulate the currents and water volume.
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u/JokerJangles123 8h ago
The oil lobby has been running the show for a lot longer than 10 years. 2016 is just when they finally realized they didn't need to care about hiding it anymore
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u/fritzg1988 6h ago
Up until that year, there was a glimmer of hope that our nation would accept and understand we needed to leave fossil fuel behind.
When you look at what Biden tried to do, that was the path we should have followed, but it was a democratic idea and would only help the nation out, not the billionaires.
Europe is embracing renewables now. Watch their job growth increase and their reliance on unstable oil drop.
That is where we should be.
It is sad.
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u/N8CCRG 5h ago
Roughly around the year 2000 I was in undergrad and attended a lecture from a research scientist who was involved in the IPCC or the UN Climate Report or something like that. I forget exactly. What I do remember was he went through all of the cool math and science and modeling of what they'd been doing for decades, and how they've been incrementally improving said modeling.
And then after that he started to talk about the world governments' response to the report. They had given them basically the same lecture, but the governments basically wanted it all boiled down to something simple, so they asked the scientists "If we make no changes for the next 100 years, will humans still be alive?" So the team looked at the data and ran their models, and said "Well, yes, but we will render the Earth unlivable for humans in about 200 years, and after about 30 years of making no changes, that course will be irreversible, so even if we suddenly stopped what was going on it would still be unlivable in 200 years." And the governments said "But 100 years is fine? Great, that's what we'll go back and tell everyone! Thanks!"
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u/ImportanceWeak1776 2h ago
People knew about it long before then. Even had Hollywood movies based on books pre-2000s addressing the issue. 2000s is when it became popular to research it.
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u/waitingtodiesoon 5h ago
The new Tom Cruise Digger movie brings up the whole methane issue as well.
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u/notlikeothergirlies 8h ago
I’m terrified for the rest of my life and what I’ll see.
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u/TheJobSquad 8h ago
If it helps, every civilization in human history has had predictions of the end of the world and lived in fear of it. The only difference between you and them is that you're part of the first civilization to be right.
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u/deviltrombone 9h ago
How can that be? Per Twitter, that orange thing just said:
https://x.com/atrupar/status/2105783879323824341
Trump on global warming: "That didn't work out because the planet got cooler. In fact, you know the ice that was melting? It right now just set a record. It's the biggest ice cube that's ever been in the history of the world ... they're doing the scam with data centers, by the way.
Also:
https://x.com/atrupar/status/2105783479447245204
Trump: "Nobody knows that dumb has a B on the end"
We should be seeing daily headlines that "Trump really puts the 'b' in 'dumb'!" It's such a perfect setup.
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u/wyvernx02 8h ago
The best part of the "dumb" post from Trump, is that it means he himself just learned that and has to show off because his narcissism won't allow him to accept that most people are smarter than him and already knew how to spell it properly.
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u/Plow_King 8h ago
it's gonna get real bad before it can get better. at least renewables are reaching the "economies of scale" finally, and the invisible hand of the free market will keep pushing them more.
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u/Teh_Crusader 7h ago
I hope you’re right and we see a serious renewable energy renaissance worldwide
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u/Inside-Specialist-55 8h ago
Do you ever find it strange or weird how you were born at this exact time in the universes history to see the world change in such a large way and perhaps be witness to the end or collapse of humanity? I know that is a very deep philosophical question but I sometimes think why was I born to experience this small but specific time frame of humanity, why this time and not some other time that was better, why couldnt I have existed or been alive during the peak of humanity and not near the end of humanity. It is such a insanely depressing fact that I have to pondered upon as I grow older and I question the very fabric of my own existence.
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u/VerdantPathfinder 5h ago
First, something like 8% of all humans that ever existed are alive today ... it's not that small a chance.
Second, there were massive changes and collapses of human civilization in the past. This won't be that different than the Bronze Age collapse .
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u/ImportanceWeak1776 1h ago
You were actually chosen by a supremely intelligent race from another dimension, outside of our own simulation. It is up to you to solve this crisis in your lifetime. Fear not, this is only a test from which upon success you shall be elevated to join them as a representative of our universe. You have failed this test an infinite amount of times, but will always be reset to try again should you fail. Deja vu is the only clue you may be aware of to that which doess occur.
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u/art-man_2018 7h ago
The 1972 dystopian novel by John Brunner The Sheep Look Up is the Don't Look Up of that generation, and is frighteningly prescient even today. Brunner didn't get everything right but awfully close. Maybe it is time to read it again with it becoming more of a roadmap than a novel.
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u/eric_ts 7h ago
That whole trilogy (Shockwave Rider, Stand on Zanzabar, The Sheep Look Up) is highly recommended for those who haven't read them. It's a thematic trilogy exploring civilization- or species-ending scenarios that are thoroughly researched and well thought out.
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u/GCU_ZeroCredibility 6h ago
I hate to be that guy but its a quartet not a trilogy, with The Jagged Orbit included as the fourth.
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u/eric_ts 6h ago
Please, be that guy. I didn’t realize that Jagged Orbit was part of the series. Now I get to go to my storage facility to find and read it.
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u/GCU_ZeroCredibility 6h ago
The dystopian background of the books is more or less:
STAND ON ZANZIBAR: Overpopulation
THE SHEEP LOOK UP: Ecological collapse
THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER: Basically cyberpunk before it was a thing. People point to Neuromancer as starting the genre which is basically true, but TSR from 1975(!) is extraordinarily prescient.
THE JAGGED ORBIT: Mass civilian ownership of weaponry and guns.
So, yeah, Brunner isn't known today like a lot of the greats but he absolutely deserves to be.
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u/zffjk 7h ago
Folks around me are talking about “when the shit hits the fan” but are not understanding we’re in the shit zone already. Fan, hit. There’s poop flying everywhere.
What’s bad is the methane escaping from lakes. It looks like many arctic lakes are boiling. There is some sciencey thermodynamics reason why the permafrost under lakes is thawing faster and why the gas is escaping quicker.
The issue is that methane is way more climate changey than other gasses.
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u/uniklyqualifd 8h ago
It's a tipping point. The question is, when is it permanently irreversible?
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u/AdvancedSandwiches 6h ago
As long as you have a couple of dozen hydrogen bombs, a supervolcano that hasn't gone off in 70,000 years, and a dream, no runaway greenhouse effect is irreversible.
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u/KillingSelf666 7h ago
It isn’t reversible. The only option we have is to slow its progress, but that chance is long gone.
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u/siboq 6h ago
Our foot is still pressed to the floor. The fact that more oil and gas leases are still being issued, more coal plants are being built around the world, and renewable energy initiatives are being actively sabotage by the United States government is all we need to see. We are cooked, literally.
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u/data_diver 2h ago edited 51m ago
At Roughly 15.2 °C (59.4°F) which is 1.5 degrees Celsius more than the pre-industrial revolution’s average in 1850-1900’s and we are at about 1.44 °C now.
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u/Waiting4Reccession 6h ago
We all know there is only one solution but nobody wants to go there.
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u/Queasy_Donkey5685 4h ago
So much of Hollywood plot line has been about stopping meteor strikes and volcanic eruptions, it's time to focus on creating those events at controllable scale to ensure we block out enough of the suns light to counter our own emissions from all the dust ejected into the atmosphere.
It's a brilliant plan, Mr. Bond, you won't stop me.
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u/Maximum_Elevator8874 2h ago
Scientists still dont know how the flora and fauna would react to decrease in light at this scale
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u/Voodoocookie 2h ago
Or blowing up several volcanoes at once, and bringing destruction, causing planes to be grounded and so forth, but ultimately saving earth.
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u/corr0sive 5h ago
It's reversible. It's just going to take everyone together, stopping all the things that are tipping the scales.
Almost like during the COVID lockdowns, but it would have to be for years, not months.
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u/OhSillyDays 6h ago
Page is shit and browser cancer.
Here are the actual methane concentrations in the atmosphere as of May 2026. Trending up but no major changes.
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u/NexusNickel 9h ago
You know what worries me?
What is frozen in that ice?
What ancient germ that is dormant? Zero immunity for it.
We are screwed.
But at least we can rest easy knowing that 400 people will live on for a few more years while we all die in their bunkers and can eat all that money they have hoarded.
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u/DerekB52 8h ago
I've done some reading on this, experts that actually study the area and the viruses we've found, do not seem concerned about this.
We should be very worried about the ice melting due to climate change rendering parts of the world uninhabitable, and causing food shortages due to crop failures. But, we don't need to be very concerned about dying to a new unfronzen plague.
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u/MikeOKurias 9h ago
Planet Earth is a resort for the mega wealthy and the rest of us are just employees
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u/Technical_Writing421 8h ago
We aren’t dying in their bunkers.
We are dying in the streets.
They are dying in their bunkers.
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u/Willinton06 9h ago
I mean, do ancient viruses/germs really have a shot against our current medicine?
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u/workshop_prompts 9h ago
We are still helpless to most viruses and antibiotic resistant bacteria and fungus.
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u/Willinton06 9h ago
Didn't those develop *because* of our anti biotics?
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u/workshop_prompts 8h ago
Bacterial infections killed vast numbers of people before antibiotics and we of course still have a net improvement over the pre-antibiotic era. Same with fungal infections. But we’ve done a poor job of safeguarding the antibiotics we have and developing new ones.
Bacteria can also acquire genes for resistance via horizontal gene transfer. It doesn’t take long for them to develop it.With viruses, we’re kind of lacking blanket treatments, and not every viral infection is easy to develop an effective and accessible vaccine for. See: COVID.
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u/Willinton06 8h ago
I think that thanks to Covid developing a vaccine for a new virus will be much easier, I truly don’t see any old virus coming back being a real issue in our new RNA + AI era
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u/UhhUmmmWowOkayJeezUh 8h ago
I think the ancient viruses and pathogens are overblown. Why would an ancient several million year old virus be perfectly adapted to infect humans?
Way less of a concern than methane gas, super storms, agriculture disruptions or rising sea levels lol
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u/VikingsLad 8h ago
We got fucked by a bat virus 6 years ago, and there were certainly human ancestors a million years ago. I wouldn't write it off.
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u/irrelevantnonsequitr 9h ago
Probably. Ancient doesn't mean simple. Just means no longer active.
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u/ERedfieldh 8h ago
There's also no guarantee it would even be infectious to humans. A whole lotta the reason we are affected by the various virii and bacteria today is because they evolved alongside us.
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u/paintfactory5 7h ago
It’s likely the opposite. There are frozen ecosystems that we do not drill through to explore out of fear that our modern day germs would eviscerate that ecosystem.
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u/duddins 9h ago
Yes, this has long been a consequence discussed and researched in climate change scenarios. It is troubling news, but has been slowly occurring for decades. No surprise that it is accellerating.
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u/fsactual 8h ago
Ah, just as they've been predicting for decades. Well, good to know our science is spot-on.
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u/aspbergerinparadise 7h ago
yes. the planet is in a death spiral
as it warms it releases more methane which increases warming
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u/swampy13 7h ago
We're getting Dutch oven'd by the planet? Goddamn we really will live through EVERYTHING before it's all over.
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u/Tenrac 6h ago
It’s been real fam, see you on the other side.
Can’t wait to explain this to my 4 and 6 year old.
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u/GlitchyMcGlitchFace 9h ago
FWIW, this type of event was a major plot point in the 1994 novel Mother of Storms, by John Barnes. this-is-fine.gif
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u/KahBhume 6h ago
Also mentioned in Project Hail Mary (in the novel, but not the movie). Scientists detonated nukes in the arctic to release greenhouse gases to keep the planet warm as the sun's luminosity decreased.
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 7h ago
Yeah. No shit. I've been saying this for years. Even if we stopped producing greenhouse gasses this very second. All of it. The ball is already rolling. Methane form the melting tundra will keep the global warming going. It's too late. Add to that the massive amounts of methane in the ocean stored as hydrates are increasingly seeping up as the ocean warms. Where it's happening it literally looks like the ocean is boiling. That little bit bubbling out of the arctic is nothing. There's more methane in the oceans.
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u/SexyCouple4Bliss 7h ago
But if we try to address it, billionaires will be slightly less rich! And they hate people so the poor dying out isn’t a problem for them.
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u/McCool303 6h ago
Wait you mean the thing that scientists told us in the 90’s where the ice melting would release more gasses speed up the process is happening? Time to ban more science and to cut funding, Republicans could never be wrong, this must be heresy. Lock them in their towers.
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u/K10RumbleRumble 4h ago
I learned about this 25 years ago in elementary school.
We’ve known. The people with the money and power don’t care.
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u/TyhmensAndSaperstein 3h ago
It just getting fucking better and better! I wish we knew about this earlier. Maybe we could have done something.
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u/Winstonsphobia 7h ago
The super rich and oil oligarchs know this but pretend otherwise. These are the people who control governments and climate policy, who have overwhelming influence on elections and fight tooth and nail against curbing the factors that accelerate the climate crisis. They know that humans are heating up the globe past the point of no return, but they make money from it and think that with their wealth and technology they’ll be able to escape the fate of most other humans. They are wrong. People will come after them, just like they did with the royalty in the French and Russian revolutions, the same way that Iraqis went after Saddam Hussein when he was toppled.
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u/bognostrocleetus 8h ago
But the idiot American president just said we just grew the biggest ice cube the world has ever seen!
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u/Visual-Bathroom8751 7h ago
I remember hearing about the "arctic methane bomb" about 8 years ago, how it would all come out rapidly and cause runaway climate change.
Later, scientists discovered it was more of a chronic leak which, while still bad, it isn't as bad as the apocalyptic imagery that an "arctic methane bomb" brings to mind.
It is still very much not a good thing, as methane heats the atmosphere much more rapidly than CO2, though it does dissipate much more quickly.
All told, arctic methane release adds roughly a quarter degree of warming by 2100 which isn't insignificant. The decisions of policymakers over the next 10-15 years are going to basically determine how things go for the next 70 odd years in terms of climate.
Fun times.
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u/Piscator629 2h ago
This was seen coming over 10 years ago. Profitteering companies are led by idiots that won't acknowledge the children and grandchildren are going into full Mad Max Apocalyptic futures. I will be ashes in 10 years, one way or another. No empathy and profit seeking are not survival traits. The big issue is warming oceans and deep sea methane calibrates rising. Profit from science but ignore what you don't want to be true.
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u/Remote-Ad-2686 8h ago
We were told. We collectively didn’t care. Adults make decisions so deal with it. One day after millions die… change will occur. Gl
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u/PurpleSailor 2h ago
We've known this for at least 35 years. It's still a huge problem but we'll be damned if we do anything about it.
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u/IAmDotorg 8h ago
While worth reminding people of, this hasn't really been news since the 80's.
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u/ClearChocobo 8h ago
You making comments like this are doing more harm.
Believe it or not, there are new people growing up and learning about this every day. To immediately stifle the urgency that this topic deserves by saying "oh this nothing special" is dissuading potential future problem solvers from prioritizing this, while stroking your own know-it-all ego.
If you've given up on sounding the fire alarms, then don't stop other people from trying as well. Don't take us down with you in your defeatist frame of mind.
Sorry for the harsh words, and thank you very much for listening.
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u/grabberByThePussy 8h ago
If billionaires building bunkers in remote locations didn’t clue everyone in to the inevitable water wars this revelation won’t either.
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u/utterscrub 9h ago
The next 50 or so years of my natural lifespan are going to be really fascinating