Russian scientist discovers gassy permafrost

CHERSKY, Russia — Sergei Zimov waded through knee-deep snow to reach a frozen lake where so much methane belches out of the melting permafrost that it spews out from the ice like small geysers.

In the frigid twilight, the Russian scientist struck a match to make a jet of the greenhouse gas visible. The sudden plume of fire threw him backward. Zimov stood up, brushed the snow off his parka and beamed.

"Sometimes a big explosion happens, because the gas comes out like a bomb," Zimov said. "There are a million lakes like this in northern Siberia."

In a country where many scientists scoff at the existence of global warming, Zimov has been waging a lonely campaign to warn the world about Russia's melting permafrost and its nexus with climate change. His laboratory is the vast expanse of tundra and larch forest along the East Siberian Sea, an icy corner of the world that Zimov has scrutinized almost entirely on his own for 28 years...

While his research has gone largely ignored by Russia's scientific community, it's turning heads in the West.

American science journals have published his findings, and grants from the National Science Foundation and the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation-Russia) fund much of his work.

Among Zimov's findings: The release of greenhouse gases — particularly methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide — from thawing permafrost underneath Siberian lakes could accelerate global warming and represents an especially worrisome trend in the battle to slow climate change.

"He clearly knows what he's doing," said Thomas Grenfell, a University of Washington professor who along with colleague Stephen Warren recently carried out their own climate fieldwork at Zimov's station. "Everyone is worried about global warming, and this is one of the places where you would notice things most strongly."

Few places in the world can provide stark evidence of global warming like the peat bogs, lakes and woodlands that stretch eight time zones along Russia's north Siberian coastline.

Melting permafrost awakens dormant microbes that devour thousands of tons of organic carbon, creating methane as a byproduct if no oxygen is present.

Subsoil layers of ice also are melting, transforming the landscape into a series of bowls and domes and roads into mogul runs...

In Siberia, the permafrost entombs billions of tons of organic matter from the Ice Age, when northern Russia's steppe teemed with mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, musk oxen and other wildlife.

Dormant for millennia, the permafrost is being thawed by global warming, triggering the microbial consumption that results in the release of greenhouse gases.

The process feeds on itself. As the climate warms, permafrost on the banks of Siberian lakes collapses into the water, supplying bacteria with more organic material to consume and further raising the level of methane released into the air...