> Trapped in all that permafrost is 30 billion tonnes of carbon. It’s an unfathomable amount, says Kirkwood.
It's a lot, but it's a little over 7 months of anthropogenic emissions, which, while decidedly unhelpful in the "make it to 2100" stakes, seems also fathomable.
This assumes it's CO2e being talked about. If it's 30 billion tonnes of carbon in methane, that's...rather more suboptimal, since that would be something like 15 years worth of human.
>Their paper initially included the line that the "release of up to 50 gigatonnes of predicted amount of hydrate storage [is] highly possible for abrupt release at any time". A release on this scale would increase the methane content of the planet's atmosphere by a factor of twelve,[62][63] equivalent in greenhouse effect to a doubling in the 2008 level of CO2.
It's hard for me to pick out which value is meant, because a lot of the conversation includes methane-producing microbes making even more of it as permafrost thaws. So I think it means carbon, but that carbon could potentially be turned into methane as we go. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2022061...
It's a lot, but it's a little over 7 months of anthropogenic emissions, which, while decidedly unhelpful in the "make it to 2100" stakes, seems also fathomable.
This assumes it's CO2e being talked about. If it's 30 billion tonnes of carbon in methane, that's...rather more suboptimal, since that would be something like 15 years worth of human.