I’ve weighed in on the “methane bomb” topic before – but for this video I was fortunate to catch up with some key experts at December’s American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.
Katey Walter Anthony is well known for the series of “flaming lake” videos that she and her students produced in past years, illustrating methane production in arctic lakes.
I understand U. of Alaska higher ups have some concerns about safety and have asked the kids to tone it down.
I also talked to Ben Abbott, who got his PhD studying permafrost at UA Fairbanks – and is now at Brigham Young. Ben is a terrific communicator that I’ve followed since he was a grad student years ago.
Ben told me about a young woman who contacted him with questions about the “Arctic Methane Bomb” – Juliana Musheyev had, like a number of folks, I suspect, gotten completely consumed with…
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jpratt27 
My comment under the video:
Michael Mann and others keep saying “could” melt the permafrost. You only need to go on CAMS to see the methane plumes. Which are now coming through the ice in the East Siberian Sea and off the ease coast of Novaya Zimlaye. They should ALL be saying IS melting the permafrost.
And no mention of all the craters.
My understanding of the “methane bomb” is that, if we are lucky (as it were – all methane release on this scale is bad), the defrosting cyrstals release the methane as a steady stream of gas going up through the water column. Some of the CH4 is absorbed by the water, the deeper the sea bed the more is absorbed. THe rest that reaches the surface becomes the massive plumes of CH4 we see on CAMS etc. There is constant release off the NE tip of Novaya Zimlaye island (the one where the Soviets did all their nuclear testing and dumping of reactors), it seems to be in pulses.
But what happens when the gas that is released becomes trapped under, say solid rock, an overhang or something like that. Eventually the gas builds up and the pressure exceeds the outside pressure and you get a sea-bed explosion – that to me is a ‘methane bomb’. We know there are the pingus on land, where we get methane explosions. So why not on the seabed floor? We know there are old craters all around the world on the sea floor where this has happened before. We know of 7000 craters in the Russian tundra alone.
Now a ‘methane bomb’ going off on the seabed woul;dn’t in itself be a dangerous thing immediately, apart from any ship or aircraft that happened to be passing over at that moment when the gas ‘burp’ would tip them over (this is thought to be the cause of Bermuda Triangle disappearances). It would be the subsequent tsunami that would be a problem.
There was a geology paper in 2016 that talked about a landslide off Norway 500,000 years ago, thought to have been triggered during a period of warming by a defrosting methane bed. Whatever caused it, the landslide resulted in a tsunami of mud covering east Scotland 80m deep (yes, ~250 feet!). The same place caused less dangerous tsunamis of some inches 6000 and 8000 years ago.
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