The Growing Threat of Catastrophic Storm Surge in the Next 30 Years on a Fast, Global Warming Induced, Sea Level Rise and its Consequences for Coastal Cities and Humanity

By Malcolm P.R. Light
November 11, 2012

Abstract

Methane is erupting as widespread torches and fountains in the Arctic ocean up to 1 km across and is exponentially increasing in concentration in the Arctic atmosphere (Shakova et al. 2008 and 2010; Light and Carana 2012; Light 2012). The Arctic atmospheric methane is mostly derived from Arctic subsea shelf and slope methane hydrates due to their destabilization by globally warmed Gulf Stream currents which enter the Arctic west of Svalbard and through the Barents Sea. In the North Atlantic, the surface of the Gulf Stream is heated in the summer and is marked by excessive evaporation due to the global warming effects of pollution clouds emanating from North America (Figure 5; IPCC Working Group 1. Fig. 10.12 Lavatus Prodeo, 2012).

The exponential increase in Arctic atmospheric methane has caused an exponential decrease in the volume of Arctic sea ice and in the continent wide reflectivity (albedo) of the Greenland ice cap (Light 2012; NASA Mod 10A1 data, from Carana, 2012). The atmospheric Arctic methane which is almost half the density of air is rising like hydrogen into the Stratosphere where it is forming and all encompassing global warming veil further aggravating the global warming of the lower level greenhouse gas clouds.

The ice melt back curves from the oldest lower 5* year old ice to the youngest shallowest 2 and 1 year old ice are caused by the progressive increase in temperature of the Gulf Stream “Atlantic Waters” which are entering the Arctic beneath the ice and melting it from the bottom up. The heating of the Gulf Stream waters is directly linked to the global warming of the North Atlantic caused by green house gas pollution blowing east off North America.

Above summary diagram (Figure 15, click on image to enlarge) shows all the determined global warming temperature curves and the latest "Sandy" storm surge curve based on a mean storm surge of 14 feet added to the mean latent heat of ice melting curve (Light 2012; Fichetti, 2012). All the global warming curves converge on a region between 2034 and 2052 where the mean atmospheric temperature anomaly will be greater than 8°C and all of the Earth's ice caps will have melted with a consequent sea level rise of 68.3 m (224 feet) above mean sea level (Wales, 2012). In particular the accelerated global warming curve from Carana (2012) and the "Sandy" storm surge curve converge on the mean atmospheric temperature extinction point derived from 20 estimates (Light 2012). This gives great confidence in the interpretation that we can expect catastrophic climate change from methane induced global warming between 2034 and 2052 unless humanity sharply cuts back some 90 to 95% on global greenhouse gas emissions and converts all its energy resources to renewable energy/ nuclear power.

A series of progressive extinction zones have been determined (after Parry et al. 2007) and include:-

• Bleaching of most corals when the atmospheric temperature anomaly is between 1 and 2°C
• Extreme droughts will extend over 1 - 30% of the land area when the atmospheric temperature anomaly exceeds 2°C which will make more than 1.8 billion people water stressed.
• Widespread coral mortality will occur when the mean atmospheric temperature anomaly is between 2.5°C and 3.5°C and will be associated with a massive increase in the ferocity of tropical cyclones/hurricanes far in excess of the Sandy super storm.
• Complete deglaciation and coastal inundation is expected when the mean atmospheric temperature anomaly increases from 4 to 8°C with a consequent sea level rise of some 68.3 metres (224 feet) above sea level. There will be major global extinction over this temperature interval as cereal production sharply decreases outside of the tropics.

Super storm Sandy has shown that Manhattan is already open to storm surge flooding and by 2016 when the Arctic Ocean begins to be free of ice, we can expect more violent hurricanes bearing down on the eastern coastline of the United States and increasing catastrophic damage to the coastal cities there.

The Alamo Project is a call for United States scientists and engineers to volunteer to develop a system of destroying the fast growing methane clouds in the atmosphere by radio/laser means or other processes before they destroy us. See this page:-
http://www.facebook.com/AlamoProject

Immediate and concerted action must be taken by governments and oil companies to depressurize the Arctic subsea methane reserves by extracting the methane, liquefying it and selling it as a green house gas energy source (see the ANGELS Project). See this post:-
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2012/06/angels-proposal.html

If greenhouse gas emissions are not sharply curtailed by 90% to 95% and the Arctic subsea and atmospheric methane extracted and destroyed, mean rising sea levels will breach the Thames Barrier by 2029 flooding London and the proposed Verrazano Narrows barrier in New York by 2030. The base of the Washington Monument (D.C.) will be inundated by 2031. By 2051, total global deglaciation will finally cause the sea level to rise up the lower 35% of the Washington Monument and humanity will have been eliminated by worldwide flooding and firestorms.

Arctic methane: Why the sea ice matters

Arctic methane: Why the sea ice matters 

a new film by Envisionation.co.uk

Interviews with:

James Hansen - NASA

Natalia Shakhova - IARC

Peter Wadhams - Cambridge University, UK

David Wasdell - Apollo-Gaia Project

Arctic Methane: Why The Sea Ice Matters

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSsPHytEnJM

Short link: https://youtu.be/iSsPHytEnJM

James Hansen: If it begins to allow the Arctic Ocean to warm up and warm the ocean floor, then we'll begin to release methane [from] hydrates, and if we let that happen, that's a potential tipping points that we don't want to pass. There are now observations that methane is beginning to be released by both melting tundra on the land and bubbling up in the Arctic Ocean, indicating some warming of the Arctic Ocean.

Natalia Shakhova: The total amount of methane in the current atmosphere is about 5 Gt. The amount of carbon preserved in the form of methane in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is ~ from hundreds to thousands Gt. What divides this methane from the atmosphere is a very shallow water column and a weakening permafrost, which is losing its ability to serve as a seal. This area is very seismically and tectonically active and there was some investigation that the tectonic activity is increasing.

Peter Wadhams: At the rate we're going, it will bring us to an ice-free Arctic in about four years time. [The Arctic Ocean] now warms up to about 5 degrees [5°C or 41°F, i.e.] enough to start warming up the seabed. The seabed at the moment is frozen, but it's now starting to melt. That's allowing a lot of methane which is trapped under the permafrost to be released. That's a large boost to global warming, because methane is an extremely powerful climatically-active gas. 

David Wasdell: The warm water from the surface is now being mixed down to those areas that it never reached when the whole area was covered in sea ice. As soon as the area is open water, you have a process of heating that goes right down to those clathrate deposits on the seabed. The more the methane is released into the atmosphere, the faster the heating goes. It's probably the greatest threat we face, as a planet. We're already in a mass extinction event.

Further quotes
Further videos
News reports
FAQs
Facts

Did Sandy trigger major earthquakes off Vancouver?

The NASA image below gives an impression of the strength of hurricane Sandy, as it approached the U.S. coast on October 28, 2012. 

Image produced with data from a radar scatterometer on the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Oceansat-2,
showing the strength and direction of Sandy’s ocean surface winds on October 28, 2012.

This animation was created by Alex Hutko, a seismologist at the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) in Seattle. It shows how seismic stations lit up as hurricane Sandy continued its path.

The images below are screenshots from the animation, showing how three eathquakes hit the coast off British Columbia in Canada, coinciding with large tremors caused by Sandy. A 7.7 magnitude earthquake (image below) hit the coast off Vancouver on October 28, 2012, at around 2:00 EDT. The USGS later upgraded the earthuake to magnitude 7.8 and gave the time as 3:04 UTC.

 

 

A 6.3 earthquake below hit the area the same day (October 28, 2012) at 17:00 EDT (USGS: 18:54 UTC).

 

 

A 6.2 earthquake (image below) followed on October 30, 2012.

 

 

The USGS image below gives further time and location details of these earthquakes using UTC time. 

 

 

There were more earthquakes than that. At the USGS site, I counted 90 further earthquakes in the area with a magnitude of at least 4 that occurred within days of the first earthquake.

 

Paul Beckwith, regular contributor to this blog, gives the following comments on the question whether Sandy was the trigger for major earthquakes off Vancouver.

“Sandy was a massive storm, packing an enormous amount of energy. According to Jeff Master's Wunderground blog, she carried the energy equivalent of five Hiroshima sized nuclear bombs.

 

As she approached the eastern seaboard of the United States she was detected on the seismic stations in the U.S. As she moved her large size (tropical storm winds within a 900 mile diameter) and extremely low pressure center (940 mb usually indicative of Category 3 or even 4 magnitude hurricanes), she sucked enormous quantities of ocean water upward.

 

Clearly, this adds tremendous stresses onto the earths crust and pushes it downward; this was reflected in the seismic stations. The animation of her progress shows the ground stresses across North America between October 14th and November 1st. On her northward jaunt up the eastern coast the seismic strain lit up to a peak and there was a 7.8 magnitude earthquake (Oct 28th, 3:04 UTC) off Vancouver, as shown in the first image.

 

As she continued northward and just before her extremely unusual left turn (due to extreme waviness of Rossby wave jet streams leading to continental low and northward tilted blocking high), there was another maximum of red seismic activity and a 6.3 magnitude aftershock (October 28, 18:54 UTC).

 

Then she turned left and as she crossed the coastline just south of NYC there was a second large aftershock of 6.2 magnitude (October 30, 2:38 UTC). Again, this aftershock coincided with large seismic activity indicated in red on the east coast.

 

Coincidence? I think not. Stress on one side of a continental plate (North American plate in this case) can deflect the plate downward locally and cause it to bow up or down afar, i.e. on the other side of the plate of the west coast). The precise coincidence of the timing for the main quake and the 2 aftershocks with peaks of seismic activity on the eastern coast seems to match too closely to be a mere coincidence, but more study is required.”

In conclusion, there is a danger that storms and cyclones trigger submarine earthquakes, which can in turn cause shockwaves and landslides over a wide area, destabilizing hydrates and triggering massive releases of methane in the process. As the sea ice disappears, the Arctic Ocean increasingly features open waters which are more prone to cyclones.

Arctic Sea Ice set to collapse in 2015

The image below depicts Arctic sea ice volume as calculated by PIOMAS (the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System at the Polar Science Center

Total Arctic sea ice volume from PIOMAS showing the volume of the mean annual cycle.

Below, the average monthly volume data over the years with exponential trends added by Wipneus, incorporating the data for November 2012. 

In November 2012, the average Arctic sea ice thickness over ice-covered regions fell below one meter, as illustrated by the image below. 

Average Arctic sea ice thickness over the ice-covered regions from PIOMAS for a selection of years.
The average thickness is calculated for the PIOMAS domain by only including locations where ice is thicker than .15 m

As the sea ice gets thinner, the risk increases that the ice will break up. More open water makes the Arctic Ocean more prone to storms and associated feedbacks that can be expected to speed up such break up. Furthermore, they can push much of the ice into the Atlantic Ocean, leaving little ice in the Arctic Ocean to reflect sunlight back into space and to act as a buffer when temperatures start rising again the following year. For more on such feedbacks, see the post Diagram of Doom. 

Professor Peter Wadhams warns in an article in Scientific American that the rate at which summer melting is outstripping accumulation of new ice in winter makes the entire ice cover likely to collapse by 2015. Less ice means that less sunlight will be reflected back into space; as a result, warming in the Arctic will accelerate dramatically. Because a third of the Arctic Ocean is composed of shallow shelf seas, surface warming will extend to the seabed, melt offshore permafrost and trigger the release of methane, which has a much greater greenhouse warming effect than CO2. A Russian-U.S. expedition led by Igor Semiletov has recently observed more than 200 sites off the coast of Siberia where methane is welling up from the seabed. Atmospheric measurements also show that methane levels are rising, most likely largely from Arctic emissions. To avoid the consequences of a collapse of summer ice, we need to bring back the ice we have lost. That will require more than merely slowing the pace of warming—we need to reverse it, Professor Wadhams adds.