Three weeks ago, I wrote how warming in the Arctic is producing massive methane plumes as the methane hydrate on the ocean floor melts, well it’s also happening off the East Coast of the United States:

Plumes of bubbles streaming from hundreds of newly discovered sea-floor seeps between North Carolina and Massachusetts are likely to contain methane and could be adding as much as 90 tonnes of the planet-warming gas to the atmosphere or overlying waters each year, research published Sunday in Nature Geoscience suggests.


An estimated two-thirds of the emissions emanate from sediments at depths where methane-rich ices may be decomposing due to warming waters along the ocean bottom, the researchers say. Effects of these plumes on climate and ocean chemistry are not yet clear, but could extend well beyond the plumes themselves.

………

However, many of the sources along the continental slope lie at cold depths in which ices have formed at high pressures within sea-floor sediments, which once trapped methane produced by microbes living there. These ices may now be slowly breaking down because of the warming of overlying waters, says Skarke. At least one previous study2 has hinted that warming waters are destabilizing methane-rich ices at moderate depths farther south along the US Atlantic coast.

This is end of the world stuff.

Seriously.