Methane Gas May Destroy the Earth, thoughts on how to save the planet.

Red alert: We’ve awakened a beast that may consume the planet.   Global warming has started a chain reaction and is now causing huge releases of frozen methane. Methane is a green house gas itself which will cause further warming.  Our planet may be converted into a fiery hell world thanks to our denial and ignorance.  (Even if the release is part of a natural cycle human emissions since the industrial age have sped this along. )

Image: Ice and methane bubbles dance across the surface of the East Siberian Sea.

Arctic seabeds are belching massive quantities of methane, according to a new study that says ocean permafrost is a huge and largely overlooked source of the powerful greenhouse gas, which has been linked to global warming.

Previous research had found methane bubbling out of melting permafrost—frozen soil—in Arctic wetlands and lakes.

But the permafrost lining the deep, cold seas was thought to be staying frozen solid, holding in untold amounts of trapped methane.

“It’s not the case anymore,” said study leader Natalia Shakhova, a biogeochemist at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska. “The permafrost is actually failing in its ability to preserve this leakage.”

(Related: “Methane Bubbling Up From Undersea Permafrost?”)

In fact, Shakhova and colleagues estimate that roughly eight million tons of methane are leaking into the atmosphere each year from the East Siberia Sea (map), fueling concerns of accelerated global warming. – nationalgeographic

… Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, said Shakhova.

Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher, and scientists are concerned because the undersea permafrost “has been showing signs of destabilization already,” she added.

“If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions… would be significantly larger.”

Geological records indicate that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods. -  commondreams

Extinction by methane may have happened before.

What caused the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history 251 million years ago? An asteroid or comet colliding with Earth? A greenhouse effect? Volcanic eruptions in Siberia? Or an entirely different culprit? A Northwestern University chemical engineer believes the culprit may be an enormous explosion of methane (natural gas) erupting from the ocean depths.

In an article published in the September issue of Geology, Gregory Ryskin, associate professor of chemical engineering, suggests that huge combustible clouds produced by methane gas trapped in stagnant bodies of water and suddenly released could have killed off the majority of marine life and land animals and plants at the end of the Permian era — long before dinosaurs lived and died.

The mechanism also might explain other extinctions and climate perturbations (ice ages) and even the Biblical flood, as well as be the cause of future catastrophes.

Ryskin calculated that some 10,000 gigatons of dissolved methane could have accumulated in water near the ocean floor under high pressure. If released quickly, perhaps triggered by an earthquake, the resulting cloud of methane would have an explosive force about 10,000 times greater than the world’s entire stockpile of nuclear weapons. The huge conflagrations plus flooding and overturned oceans would cause the extinctions. (Approximately 95 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land species were lost.) – sciencedaily

How much time do we have before this methane release causes mass extinctions by displacing atmospheric oxygen?

This is a good time to read a bit more about methane:

What is Methane?
Methane is a fuel created biologically by decaying biological material. It is found in the ocean on the seafloor in a frozen form intermingled with water. This is called methane hydrate, a dormant form of methane that is of a condensed volume. When the methane hydrate melts, it reacts with oxygen and increases its volume over 150 times in size, and the gas is more powerful than the fossil fuels we use today. But more than 350 miles under the sea, the methane hydrate is relatively harmless. The volume that can be found is the scary part, which is over eighty-thousand times natural gas reserves, at two-hundred-thousand-trillion cubic feet. – associatedcontent

How toxic is methane?

By itself, methane is not toxic. It is extremely flammable and will cause an explosion; it will also kill you by asphyxiation if it leaks into an enclosed space and deprives you of oxygen. But methane only becomes poisonous when it forms part of another gas and is subject to certain circumstances. The bad news is that this happens quite often.

How Are People Exposed to Methane Gas?
Exposure to pure methane is by breathing, drinking, eating and touching, and many of us will have experienced all four.

1. Inhalation
   We may have breathed the gas when it has entered a building or home by issuing from a crack in the foundation or via a sewer trap. Or we may have unwittingly inhaled methane when we passed close by a septic tank, sewer, manhole or farm waste pit.
2. Ingestion
   It is possible but doubtful that you have drunk a glass of water contaminated with methane. Methane created naturally underground can certainly make its way through the soil and into a water reservoir or lake, but even if this happens, the gas tends to evaporate quickly. Similarly, a young child may eat dirt that has traces of methane. But the levels of exposure are low and there are no known effects on the body.
3. Touch
   As for touching, methane gas has trouble passing through the skin, so you are unlikely to absorb it. But if methane does enter your system, by whatever means, your body will remove it swiftly through your breath, blood and urine. And medical research on the issue shows that even after years of exposure to methane, our reproductive and internal organs remain unaffected.

So after all this, you might feel entitled to breathe a sigh of relief and move on. But I wouldn’t dismiss methane detection so easily if I were you. Methane is not a safe gas and you dare not ignore it. Why else do we place fans under buildings to remove methane emissions that we have discovered are seeping from the ground? The reason is not just the flammability of the gas but its properties as an asphyxiant: methane displaces oxygen, and in an area without ventilation will cause suffocation.

Identifying Methane Exposure by Symptoms
Is it possible, then, for us to identify methane gas before we succumb? Perhaps. Impending suffocation may give rise to symptoms such as headaches and dizziness as the amount of oxygen in our bodies depletes. This was a problem among some of the students at the New London School before the methane ignited and caused terrible destruction and death (see Historical Events Where Methane Gas Has Killed). But it is just as likely that we will feel nothing until our brain registers a deficiency of oxygen and causes us to gasp for air. By then, however, it is usually too late for us to do anything other than collapse.

// Carbon Monoxide is a Byproduct of Methane

This problem of ventilation is critical when natural gas (which is 97% methane) is burned in our homes, offices and businesses. When natural gas is burning in our boilers, heating radiators and water, and for some reason has an insufficient air supply, carbon monoxide is produced.

Carbon monoxide is colorless, non-irritating, odorless, tasteless and deadly. At 200 ppm (parts per million), you develop a frontal headache after just one to two hours of exposure. At 1600ppm (just 0.16%), you are dizzy, have a headache and feel nauseous within twenty minutes; you are dead in under two hours. At 12800ppm, you are lifeless in less than three minutes.

40,000 people each year in the United States require medical attention after inhaling carbon monoxide fumes, and many of them suffer permanent damage to their heart muscles. 500 people a year die as a direct result of carbon monoxide exposure.

Confusion About Symptoms
The symptoms are easily confused with other conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, flu, and migraines. Other more advanced symptoms you may experience include confusion, convulsions and unconsciousness. At the clinical level, you may have tachycardia (rapid heartbeat) and hypertension (high blood pressure).

Carbon monoxide also affects the central nervous system, causing hallucinations and a heightened emotional state. This can give rise to sightings of “ghosts” and apparent supernatural occurrences.

The gas behind all this is methane, which in the form of natural gas is piped into some 67 million homes across America. We shouldn’t be scared of it – but we should certainly be wary.

via Methane Gas Detection.

How can we survive? How can we save the planet? Could we extract the methane from the atmosphere?

Methane is present in the atmosphere, at roughly 1.7 parts per million (wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth’s_atmosphere#Composition)). It is in principle possible to extract it in large quantities by the same mechanism that we get nitrogen, argon, and other noble gases – by liquefying large volumes of air, and seperating the components by boiling point (fractional distillation). However, this involves liquefying one million litres of air for each 1.7 litres of CH4 – so unfortunately you’d have to put in far more energy to extract it then you’d get back by burning it.

Someone quickly needs to make a system that can liquefy a million liters of air using the power from less than 1.7 litres of methane, then we need to mass produce these devices and deploy them everywhere.  The system would have to dispose of the CO2 produced. This would save the earth and fix our energy shortage.

Who knows how much energy it currently takes to liquefy a million liters of air and extract methane? Other ideas?

Long range sensors detect precursors of life-enabling organic molecules in Orion Nebula

ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory has revealed the chemical fingerprints of potential life-enabling organic molecules in the Orion Nebula, a nearby stellar nursery in our Milky Way galaxy. This detailed spectrum — obtained with the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HIFI), one of Herschel’s three innovative instruments — demonstrates the gold mine of information that Herschel-HIFI will provide on how organic molecules form in space.

Several German Institutes contributed essential parts to the HIFI instrument: the Universität zu Kölkn and the Max-Planck-Institute für Radioastronmie, Bonn, und für Sonnensystemforschung, Lindau.

Striking features in the HIFI spectrum include a rich, dense pattern of “spikes,” each representing the emission of light from a specific molecule in the Orion Nebula. This nebula is known to be one of the most prolific chemical factories in space, although the full extent of its chemistry and the pathways for molecule formation are not well understood. By sifting through the pattern of spikes in this spectrum, astronomers have identified a few common molecules that appear everywhere in the spectrum. The identification of the many other emission lines is currently ongoing.

By clearly identifying the lines associated with the more common molecules, astronomers can then begin to tease out the signature of particularly interesting molecules that are the direct precursors to life-enabling molecules. A characteristic feature of the Orion spectrum is the spectral richness: among the molecules that can be identified in this spectrum are water, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, methanol, dimethyl ether, hydrogen cyanide, sulphur oxide, sulphur dioxide and their isotope analogues. It is expected that new organic molecules will also be identified.

“This HIFI spectrum, and the many more to come, will provide a virtual treasure trove of information regarding the overall chemical inventory and on how organics form in a region of active star formation. It harbours the promise of a deep understanding of the chemistry of space once we have the full spectral surveys available,” said Edwin Bergin of the University of Michigan, principal investigator of the HEXOS Key Programme on Herschel.

via Precursors of life-enabling organic molecules in Orion Nebula unveiled by Herschel Space Observatory.

The Orion Nebula is about 1,500 light years away from Earth. At warp factor 5, the maximum speed of the Enterprise NX-01, it would take 12 years to get there.  The Enterprise NCC-1701 at warp factor 8 could reach the Orian Nebula in either 1.4 years or about 3 years, depending on which warp speed calculation you use:

On the original series from the 1960s, Star Trek’s Warp 8 = 512 times the speed of light. It was a simple formula: Velocity = Warp Factor cubed times the speed of light.

Example: Warp 8 = 8 x 8 x 8 = 512

Star Trek – The Next Generation revised the formula so that Warp 8 = 1,024 times the speed of light.

http://home.att.net/~srschmitt/script_warpcalc.html

100-year-old woman says drink and cigarettes keep her young

A woman who toasted her 100th birthday today with a cigarette and a tot of whisky said she would also be raising a glass to 70 years as a committed smoker and drinker.

Lorna Gobey smoked her first cigarette in 1940 – the same year the country was blitzed during the Battle of Britain.

The retired cinema-usher, who smokes 20 Sterling Superkings Blue a day, has gone through over half-a-million cigarettes since then.

The great grandmother of 55 – who also has who has 27 grandchildren and 12 great-great grandchildren – danced the night away at her local Labour Club on Monday, where she enjoyed her favourite tipple – a whiskey Guinness chaser.

Mrs Govey attributes her longevity to her fun-loving lifestyle and said her family ”wouldn’t dare” tell her to stop smoking.

Speaking from her home in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, yesterday, she said: ”I’ve been smoking since I was 30 and have had no problems at all.

”People try and tell you it’s bad for you but my family wouldn’t dare ask me to stop. If they did, I’d put them across my lap and give them a slapped bum.

”I’ve always tried to enjoy life. I think it’s important to do the things you want to do and not to let things get you down.

”I like my smokes, a drop of whiskey and Guinness and I still love to play skittles. Perhaps it’s part of the reason I have lived for so long. I never thought I’d make it to 100, but I have. I’m quite amazed really.”

Mrs Gobey was born in Apperly, near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, in 1910, before moving to nearby Cheltenham where she has lived ever since.

She had a variety of jobs including cleaning, cooking and working as an usher at the Goldmont cinema – later renamed the Odeon, where she started smoking aged 30. …

via World around us: WTF.

Anyone who makes it to 100 is pretty amazing. Without smoking and drinking would she live 20 years longer?

Yellow snow falls in Russia’s Far East

The Amur region in Russia’s Far East was hit by yellow snow, told Elena Pechkina, a regional meteorologist.

High winds in Mongolia mixed the clouds from a front with dust and sand, crossed northern China, and then dumped the unique-colored snow in Russia.

“This type of precipitation is not harmful to the residents of the area and no additional analyses will be done,” Pechkina said.

She said this type of snow was not rare, however usually falls in the region at the end of March or early April.

via World around us: Yellow snow falls in Russia’s Far East.

In addition to King Henry I of England, I’m related to Lady Godiva

My mother has been really getting into my family’s genealogy. In addition to King Henry I of England, it seems that I am also related to Lady Godiva. Besides knowing that Godiva chocolates are some of the best from back when I used to eat sugar, I didn’t know anything about her.  Here is the Wikipedia entry on her:

Lady Godiva (fl. 1040–1080), was an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who, according to legend, rode naked through the streets of Coventry, in England, in order to gain a remission of the oppressive taxation imposed by her husband on his tenants. The name “Peeping Tom” for a voyeur originates from later versions of this legend in which a man named Tom had watched her ride and was struck blind or dead.

Legend

According to the popular story, Lady Godiva took pity on the people of Coventry, who were suffering grievously under her husband’s oppressive taxation. Lady Godiva appealed again and again to her husband, who obstinately refused to remit the tolls. At last, weary of her entreaties, he said he would grant her request if she would strip naked and ride through the streets of the town. Lady Godiva took him at his word and, after issuing a proclamation that all persons should stay indoors and shut their windows, she rode through the town, clothed only in her long hair. Only one person in the town, a tailor ever afterwards known as Peeping Tom, disobeyed her proclamation in one of the most famous instances of voyeurism.[16] In the story, Tom bores a hole in his shutters so that he might see Godiva pass, and is struck blind.[17] In the end, Godiva’s husband keeps his word and abolishes the onerous taxes.

The oldest form of the legend has Godiva passing through Coventry market from one end to the other while the people were assembled, attended only by two knights.[18] This version is given in Flores Historiarum by Roger of Wendover (died 1236), a somewhat gullible collector of anecdotes, who quoted from an earlier writer. The later story, with its episode of “Peeping Tom,” appeared first among 17th century chroniclers.

At the time, it was customary for penitents to make a public procession in only their shift, a sleeveless white garment similar to a slip today and one which was certainly considered “underwear.” Thus, some scholars speculate, Godiva may have actually travelled through town as a penitent, in her shift. Godiva’s story may have passed into folk history to be recorded in a romanticised version. Another theory has it that Lady Godiva’s “nakedness” may refer to her riding through the streets stripped of her jewellery, the trademark of her upper class rank. However, both these attempts to reconcile known facts with legend are weak; there is no known use of the word “naked” in the era of the earliest accounts to mean anything other than “without any clothing whatsoever.”^[19]

Moreover, there is no trace of any version of the story in sources contemporary with Godiva, a story that would certainly have been recorded even in its most tame interpretations. Additionally, with the founding of Coventry circa 1043, there was little opportunity for the city to have developed to an extent that would have supported such a noble gesture. Lastly, the only recorded tolls were on horses. Thus, it remains doubtful whether there is any historical basis for the famous ride.

Like the story of Peeping Tom, the claim that Godiva’s long hair effectively hid her nakedness from sight is generally believed to have been a later addition (cf. Rapunzel). Certain other thematic elements are familiar in myth and fable: the resistant Lord (cf. Esther and Ahasuerus), the exacted promise, the stringent condition and the test of chastity. Even if Peeping Tom is a late addition, his being struck blind demonstrates the closely knit themes of the violated mystery and the punished intruder (cf. Diana and Actaeon)

via Lady Godiva – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In the history of Godiva chocolates, I found this entry:

1926 – Lady Godiva

Mass production of chocolate serves to create a universal appetite for the confection, in all its forms. But it also spurs a growing demand for “luxury” chocolates made with the choicest ingredients by expert chocolatiers who blend flavors and textures into formidable, one-of-a-kind taste experiences. The Draps family begins a chocolate-making “atelier” in Brussels, the city that introduced chocolates to the Swiss more than two centuries ago. Some years later, the Draps’ son, Joseph, takes over the company and, at his wife’s suggestion, names it after Lady Godiva whose legendary exploit made her name synonymous with grace, nobility and flair. Draps’ vision is to create the world’s most elegant, handcrafted chocolates for discerning consumers.

My ex girlfriend, a graduate of the Berkeley Psychic Institute, once brought home a massive three layer box of Godiva chocolates.  We enjoyed them for days. Still a good memory.  Funny how the dots connect over time.

Scientists discover how ocean bacterium turns carbon into fuel

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. We hear this mantra time and again. When it comes to carbon‹the “Most Wanted” element in terms of climate change‹nature has got reuse and recycle covered. However, it’s up to us to reduce. Scientists at Harvard Medical School are trying to meet this challenge by learning more about the carbon cycle, that is, the process by which carbon moves from the atmosphere into plants, oceans, soils, the earth’s crust, and back into the atmosphere again.

One of the biggest movers and shakers is the lowly cyanobacteria, an ocean-dwelling, one-celled organism. Pamela Silver, HMS professor of systems biology, and colleagues have uncovered details about how this bacteria fixes, or digests, carbon. These bacteria build miniature factories inside themselves that turn carbon into fuel.

Silver and her colleagues report that the bacteria organize these factories spatially, revealing a structural sophistication not often seen in single-celled organisms. This regular and predictable spacing improves the efficiency of carbon processing. In the future, an understanding of the mechanisms that govern this spatial organization may help improve the efficiency of designer bacteria engineered to produce carbon-neutral fuels such as biodiesel and hydrogen.

These findings will be published online March 5 in the journal Science.

The rod-shaped cyanobacteria are among the most abundant organisms on earth. Forty percent of the carbon in the carbon cycle is reused and recycled through these tiny creatures. To process carbon, cyanobacteria build soccer-ball-shaped structures inside themselves called carboxysomes. These tiny factories absorb carbon dioxide and convert it into sugar, which the bacteria then use to produce energy.

“The ocean is just packed with these bacteria. By studying them, we’re understanding more about how the earth works,” said Silver, who is also on the faculty of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at HMS. “I’m blown away by what’s happening in the ocean and what we don’t understand about it. There are a lot of things in the ocean that are going to be useful to us.” …

via Scientists discover how ocean bacterium turns carbon into fuel (w/ Video).

Small Company Works on Fusion Reactor

… Using fusion as an energy source has been alternately hyped, derided and discounted over the past 55 years, ever since the first H-Bomb burst over Bikini Atoll. The potential benefits of fusion are obvious: all you have to do is look up at the sun to see fusion at work. Every second of every day the sun generates fusion reactions, expelling enough energy to create a net gain of energy that keeps our planet alive. But creating that net gain from a fusion reaction here on Earth, in a safe and easily harnessed way, has confounded the best minds on the planet for more than half a century.

“Fusion is easy. Net gain is the hard part,” Richardson said. …

General Fusion’s reactor is a metal sphere surrounded by pneumatic pistons. The pistons create an acoustic wave that travels through a liquid metal containment layer, hitting the center with a shock wave. In the center of the sphere, a plasma target should then — in theory — implode and create fusion energy, which is then extracted with a heat exchanger. From there, steam is released to create electricity. For the reactor to have any practical purpose, it has to repeat this process every second. …

General Fusion is currently in the first stage of the project, building all the components including the sphere that will eventually contain a magnetized ball of plasma. During the second stage, due to start in 2011, they’ll build the actual reactor.

Richardson isn’t talking about incrementally lowering the cost of fusion. He’s talking about a quantum leap downward in price. The company hasn’t yet reached their stated goal of raising $50 million, a pittance compared to the money spent on government funded fusion projects, but has succeeded in raising over $9 million from private investors and $12.9 million from Sustainable Technology Development Canada, a Canadian government agency.

Where GF innovates is in adapting today’s technology to improve an old design. Fusion energy is generated in miniscule amounts of time, and thirty years ago the technology simply wasn’t available to control instruments fast enough to take control during the crucial moment when fusion energy is released.

But in 2009, we have fast and cheap computer chips that offer very precise control over motors that can create compressive forces in mere microseconds. “We got to the point in the ’70s and ’80s that we could get plasma to last milliseconds. The question was how to control it. Now, with cheap digital signal processors,” at this point Richardson points at my iPhone, “it can be done.”

And it only has to be done once. If General Fusion can prove they’ve produced net gain through fusion, the world will beat a path to their door. “The next stage would be to build a reactor at the same scale, but with the ability to reliably produce energy at a rate of once every thousand seconds. From there fusion will eventually scale up into power plants, a development Richardson estimates will cost upwards of $1 billion, but it will be a cost born by industries who will benefit immensely from the potential benefits of fusion power. Richardson: “If you look at the scale of spending on energy research and development, $50 million is peanuts. The oil and gas industry spends $20 billion to develop and deploy technology in the Alberta tar sands right now.” …

via Big Bang from a Small Company | h+ Magazine.