Apocalypse Alert

A snowball effect of sorts, but in reverse! I just heard about the bubble trouble in the Arctic North.

Pure methane, gas bubbling up from underwater vents, escaping into northern skies, adds to the global-warming gases accumulating in the atmosphere. And pure methane escaping in the massive amounts known to be locked in the Arctic permafrost and seabed would spell a climate catastrophe... Permafrost, tundra soil frozen year-round and covering almost one-fifth of Earth's land surface, runs anywhere from 50 to 600 metres deep in this region. Entombed in that freezer is carbon -- plant and animal matter accumulated through millennia. As the soil thaws, these ancient deposits finally decompose, attacked by microbes, producing carbon dioxide and -- if in water -- methane. Both are greenhouse gases, but methane is many times more powerful in warming the atmosphere.

And so, the more methane in the atmosphere, the hotter temperatures rise thus thawing the permafrost at an accelerated rate that releases more methane/carbon dioxide from ancient ice. The implications of this hopeless cycle terrify me.