Active Methane Seep

Scientists Discover Antarctica’s First Active Methane Seep

A team of marine ecologists from Oregon State University has described the formation and development of a new methane seep — a location where methane escapes from an underground reservoir and into the ocean — in the Ross Sea, the High Antarctic.

The Cinder Cones seep, the Ross Sea, Antarctica: the white microbial mats are telltale signs of areas where methane may be released from underground methane deposits. Image credit: Andrew Thurber, Oregon State University.

The Cinder Cones seep, the Ross Sea, Antarctica: the white microbial mats are telltale signs of areas where methane may be released from underground methane deposits. Image credit: Andrew Thurber, Oregon State University.

“Methane is the second-most effective gas at warming our atmosphere and the Antarctica has vast reservoirs that are likely to open up as ice sheets retreat due to climate change,” said Dr. Andrew Thurber, a marine ecologist in the College of Earth and the Department of Microbiology at Oregon State University.

“This is a significant discovery that can help fill a large hole in our understanding of the methane cycle.”

Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the planet.

Most methane in the ocean water and sediment is kept out of the atmosphere by microbes that consume it.

In 2011, an expansive (70 m by 1 m, or 230 feet by 3.3 feet) microbial mat formed at 10 m (33 feet) water depth at the site of Cinder Cones in McMurdo Sound within the Ross Sea.

“The Cinder Cones seep was discovered in an area that scientists have studied for more than 60 years, but the seep was not active until 2011,” Dr. Thurber said.

He and his colleagues discovered that the microbes around this seep are fundamentally different that those found elsewhere in the world’s oceans.

“These mats, which are produced by bacteria that exist in a symbiotic relationship with methane consumers, are a telltale indication of the presence of a seep,” he explained.

“The microbial mat is the road sign that there’s a methane seep here. We don’t know what caused these seeps to turn on. We needed some dumb luck to find an active one, and we got it.”

“Antarctica is believed to contain as much as 25% of Earth’s marine methane. Having an active seep to study gives us new understanding of the methane cycle and how that process might differ in Antarctica compared to other places on the planet.”

For example, the researchers found that the most common type of microbe that consumes methane took five years to show up at the seep site and even then those microbes were not consuming all of the methane.

That means some methane is being released and is likely working its way into the atmosphere.

 

“Studying the site over a five-year time span allowed us to see how microbes respond to the formation of a seep,” said Dr. Sarah Seabrook, who earned her doctorate at Oregon State University and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.

“What was really interesting and exciting was that the microbial community did not develop as we would have predicted based on other methane seeps we have studied around the globe.”

“We had assumed that microbes should respond really quickly to changes in the environment, but that wasn’t reflected in what we saw in Antarctica,” Dr. Thurber said.

“To add to the mystery of the Antarctic seeps, the microbes we found were the ones we least expected to see at this location.”

“There may be a succession pattern for microbes, with certain groups arriving first and those that are most effective at eating methane arriving later.”

The team’s paper was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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Andrew R. Thurber et al. Riddles in the cold: Antarctic endemism and microbial succession impact methane cycling in the Southern Ocean. Proc. R. Soc. B 287 (1931): 20201134; doi: 10.1098/rspb.2020.1134

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