Methane bomb ticks away in frozen Russia

The snows are late in coming on the Arctic Yamal peninsula where moist, dark permafrost entombed for 10,000 years crumbles into the sea at the top of the world.

Western scientists and environmentalists say collapsed river banks, rising tide waters and warmer winters in northwest Russia are clear signs of climate change, but they add Russia is in denial, ignoring a potentially disastrous “methane bomb”.

At a meteorological station at the Marresale port on the Kara Sea, about 500km north of the Arctic Circle, its director said migrating geese arrived a month earlier than usual this year, in May, as temperatures rose.

Over the past six years that Alexander Chikmaryov has worked at the station, the sea coast has eroded by at least two metres and hungry polar bears seeking alternative food have clawed into tins of condensed milk in his wife’s pantry. The first snows usually fall by late September.

As a string of recent reports warn of dire consequences from global warming, the UN wants about 190 nations to agree a new climate pact in December to succeed the Kyoto protocol.

But for Chikmaryov, global warming does not exist: “Whoever made that ridiculous idea up spends too much time at home,” said the 58-year old, surveying an exposed strip of permafrost from a mud bank that has collapsed, giving way to streamlets littered with goose skeletons.

Geographer Fyodr Romanenko of Moscow State University agreed there is no proof human activity has damaged the environment. The up to 4C rise felt across parts of the Arctic in the past 30 years could be part of millennia-old fluctuating weather patterns, he said.

Other researchers disagree, saying the frozen, sparsely populated Yamal region 2,000km northeast of Moscow holding a quarter of the world’s known gas reserves and home to the Nenets tribespeople, is testament to climate change.

According to a paper in the scientific journal Global Change Biology published last week by Bruce Forbes of Finland’s Arctic Centre, rising temperatures are making the Arctic tundra greener, adding significant growth of shrub over the past 30 years.

The world’s largest country has a thick band of permafrost – which contains organic matter whose microbes can emit the powerful greenhouse gas, methane – stretching from Murmansk near Finland to the far eastern region of Chukotka near Alaska.

Environmentalists fear melting permafrost from rising temperatures will accelerate global warming.

“We are appealing to world leaders as this issue is overlooked in Russia… there is a carbon, or methane bomb embedded in our earth,” said Vladimir Chuprov, head of the Russian energy unit at Greenpeace.

He said Russia – which has permafrost covering 60 per cent of its land – most likely holds the world’s biggest methane threat.

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