Methane Madness in the Arctic

One of my husband’s favorite sayings is, there’s a methane to my madness, (he is usually referring to his own gaseous expulsions and blaming someone else) but I didn’t know until recently that there are billions of tons of methane trapped below the surface of the East Siberian Arctic ice shelf. Around ten million tons leak out from under the ice shelf every year. Methane gas is a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent that carbon dioxide. If at any one time 50 billion tons were suddenly released global warming would fast forward 35 years and such a release could happen at any time. The negative effect is predicted loss of crops due to heat and drought especially in Africa, Asia, and South America and rising sea levels and worsening tropical storms. On the positive side, melting due to the methane release might improve access to minerals on the ocean floor, increased fishing, and ice-free shipping channels. And here I thought we had the methane problems figured out with farmers using the methane produced by cows to fuel their dairy farm machinery, but it seems that cows aren't our planet’s biggest methane challenge after all.