There is so much methane in this Arctic lake that you can turn on the air on fire

All day, the surface of Lake Esieh, north of Alaska, quivers with indigestion. This Arctic lake never freezes completely. Stay next to her and you'll hear her whistle. Look at it, and you will see it boiling with old bubbling gas. Light a fire on it, and the lake will fart a flame tower higher than your head.

That's exactly what Katey Walter Anthony, ecologist of the Aquatic Ecosystem at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, did in a popular YouTube video of 2010. Walter Anthony is studying the Lake Esieh for almost ten years (she also named it). Now, according to a profile written by Chris Mooney for the Washington Post, she knows the cause of the lake's strange behavior. The culprit is a constant infiltration of methane, a greenhouse gas, that flows into an old reservoir of permafrost (or permanently frozen ground) below the tundra. [Photographic Proof of Climate Change: Time-Lapse Images of Retreating Glaciers]

With rising global temperatures, permafrost thaws, said Walter Anthony, who dug a hole in the lake bottom. While most of Esieh Lake has an average depth of about 1 meter, the sections where the largest methane bubbles escape plunge up to 15 meters.

According to one of Walter Anthony's colleagues, huge quantities of methane gush from these holes at the bottom of the lake, which equates to the emissions of about 6,000 dairy cows. are one of the largest sources of methane in the world.

The thawing of Arctic permafrost is a major concern for climatologists. Within these frozen tablecloths of ancient plants, it is thought that thousands of years of greenhouse gases are trapped. As global temperatures rise and permafrost begins to melt, this gas is slowly released into the atmosphere. The biggest fear of researchers is that this gas emission in the Arctic will trigger a feedback loop: the more permafrost releases from greenhouse gases today, the more temperatures will rise and the more gases will be released. tomorrow.

"They accelerated the permafrost thaw," Walter Anthony told the Washington Post. "It's an acceleration."

While many climate models focus on the effects of carbon dioxide released by thawing permafrost, methane emissions in lakes like Esieh have been largely neglected until very recently. In a study of several Arctic subterranean lakes published Aug. 15 in Nature Communications, Walter Anthony and his colleagues estimated that methane-dripping lakes could double previous estimates of warming caused by permafrost.

According to a 2014 study by the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, carbon released by permafrost thaw could increase global warming by about 8%, contributing to about 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit F (4 to 5 degrees C) by 2100. If methane emissions in the Arctic are as large as predicted by Walter Anthony and his colleagues, this temperature increase could occur much more quickly.

Originally published on Live Science.