>>8793136Read the USGS paper dude. There's not enough carbon on terrestrial permafrost to dissociate. Here's an excerpt that is relevant to our discussion, they addressed your citation about developing terrestrial methane craters in the Arctic for a bit.
The argument against catastrophic & abrupt CH4 release are mulipronged and converging from many different field of study.
1. There's simply way less C in clathrate form than initially thought off.
2. Deepwater horizon oil spill, which is as close to catastrophic CH4 release from sediment as possible, show that none of the CH4 made it to the atmosphere. We have been underestimating the oxidation capacity of the ocean. Yes the ocean becomes anoxic and some fish and pelicans die along the way, but that's another story.
3. Ice core records show no evidence of CH4 release from clathrate in the past
4. Top down monitoring from NOAA air sampling station around the Arctic suggests that even under many reported rotting permafrost and melting thermokarst lakes, the Arctic is still a net sink of carbon
5. Again there's not enough C in clathrate form that is not in the ocean. The author went through exercise that the 20 Gt total C locked in terrestrial permafrost were not significant enough, considering we're already chugging 10 Gt C per year worth of CO2, plus 555 Tg CH4 per year. That's like 2 years worth of business as usual carbon emission.
The C locked in clathrate ocean sediment also won't matter, as from the Deepwater horizon spill, and countless other measurements from various places like Svalbard, Hudson Canyon, Carico Basin, East Siberian Shelf, etc practically all the hotspots of clathrate in the past 5 years all show that CH4 got eaten by bacteria in the ocean before the bubbles made it to the atmosphere.
There is no trajectories/guessing/simulations/models here. Just simple observations and deductive reasoning that all converges to one, in this case non-alarmist answer.
