The island of Svalbard, about midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, is warming twice as quick as the remainder of the Arctic, which itself is warming as much as 4 and a half times faster than the remainder of the planet. Scientists simply found that the island’s retreating glaciers are making a doubtlessly important local weather suggestions loop: When the ice disappears, groundwater that’s supersaturated with methane bubbles to the floor. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, 80 occasions as highly effective as carbon dioxide. This groundwater can have greater than 600,000 occasions the methane of a cup of water that’s been sitting with its floor uncovered to air. 

“What that means is that once it hits the atmosphere, it’s going to equilibrate, and it’s going to release as much methane as it can—quickly,” says Gabrielle Kleber, a glacial biogeochemist at University of Cambridge and the University Centre in Svalbard and lead writer of a brand new paper describing the invention in Nature Geoscience. “It’s about 2,300 tons of methane that’s released annually from springs just on Svalbard. It’s maybe equivalent to something like 30,000 cows.” (Cows burp methane—a lot of it.) 

“These numbers, I honestly thought that they were even wrong, but they cannot be wrong,” says Carolina Olid, who research Arctic methane emissions on the University of Barcelona however wasn’t concerned within the work. “Wow, they are really, really high.” 

The methane can be popping out of the bottom in some locations as pressurized fuel that Kleber can really mild on fireplace, as you’ll be able to see within the video under. “This is a widespread methane emission source that we previously just hadn’t accounted for,” says Kleber. “We can safely assume that this phenomenon is happening in other regions in the Arctic. Once we start extrapolating that and expanding it across the Arctic, we’re looking at something that could be considerable.”

As the Arctic warms quickly, scientists are discovering ways in which it’s each affected by local weather change and contributing to it. Like a freezer that’s misplaced energy, the Arctic is thawing, and the stuff inside it’s rotting, releasing clouds of greenhouse gasses. When frozen floor often known as permafrost thaws, it creates swimming pools of oxygen-poor water, the place microbes chew on natural materials and burp methane. The hotter it will get up there, the happier these microbes are and the extra methane they produce. (In some locations, the permafrost is thawing so shortly that it’s even gouging methane-spewing holes in the landscape.)

Elsewhere, huge deposits of the fuel are hidden within the floor beneath glaciers. When temperatures get low sufficient and pressures get excessive sufficient, the fuel freezes into stable methane hydrate—mainly, methane trapped in a cage of ice. That ice, in fact, can soften as temperatures rise.

The melting of the glaciers additionally exposes darker-colored land, which absorbs more of the sun’s energy and accelerates the warming of the terrain—a dreaded climatic suggestions loop.