NASA Warns Methane Is Being Belched From Newly Formed Lakes

Brand new lakes spewing out clouds of methane are appearing in Alaska. These so-called "thermokarst" lakes are formed when the permafrost ground layer, which usually stays frozen all year round, melts, releasing vast volumes of frozen water inside the soil.

One such lake is Big Trail Lake in Alaska. "This lake wasn't here 50 years ago," said Katey Walter Anthony, an ecologist at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks in a NASA statement. "Years ago, the ground was about 3 meters taller and it was a spruce forest."

These thermokarst lakes are found across the Arctic in North America and North Europe and Asia. Thermokarst lakes form after the frozen water in the ground layer melts, causing the ground surface to collapse and fill with water, creating a lake. The temperature of the water in the depression continues to warm the surrounding permafrost, leading to increased melting. They may eventually drain away again in time.

"Lakes like Big Trail are new, they're young, and they are important because these lakes are what's going to happen in the future," Walter Anthony said.

In the newly defrosted permafrost soil, there are masses of dead plants and organic matter that begin to be decomposed by the surrounding bacteria. This releases CO2 and methane. Less commonly, permafrost thaw also leads to methane trapped deep underground to escape up through the soil, rising to the surface in large bubbles and being released into the atmosphere.

"At Big Trail Lake, it's like opening your freezer door for the first time and giving all the food in your freezer to microbes to decompose. As they decompose it, they are belching out methane gas," Walter Anthony said.

According to the NASA blog post, this geological methane release is occurring at Esieh Lake in Alaska.

Carbon dioxide and methane are both greenhouse gasses, which trap heat from the sun in the atmosphere, increasing the global temperature. Greenhouse gasses are the primary driver of climate change, with methane being over 25 times more proficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Some thermokarst lakes also release nitrous oxide, which is not only over 300 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2, but also depletes the ozone layer.

Additionally, the release of this methane from the thermokarst lakes forms a positive feedback loop, as the increased temperatures caused by the greenhouse effects of the methane will cause further permafrost to melt, leading to further increased methane release from the Arctic.

The resultant climate change from the release of greenhouse gasses will have ripple effects across nearly every aspect of the environment, from increased extreme weather events like hurricanes, droughts and wildfires, to rising sea levels and mass extinctions of species.