Assessing the benthic response to climate-driven methane hydrate destabilisation: state of the art and future modelling perspectives
Assessing the benthic response to climate-driven methane hydrate destabilisation: state of the art and future modelling perspectives
Modern observations and geological records suggest that anthropogenic ocean warming could destabilise marine methane hydrate, resulting in methane release from the seafloor to the ocean-atmosphere, and potentially triggering a positive feedback on global temperature. On the decadal to millennial timescales over which hydrate-sourced methane release is hypothesized to occur, several processes consuming methane below and above the seafloor have the potential to slow, reduce or even prevent such release. Yet, the modulating effect of these processes on seafloor methane emissions remains poorly quantified, and the full impact of benthic methane consumption on ocean carbon chemistry is still to be explored. In this review, we document the dynamic interplay between hydrate thermodynamics, benthic transport and biogeochemical reaction processes, that ultimately determines the impact of hydrate destabilisation on seafloor methane emissions and the ocean carbon cycle. Then, we provide an overview of how state-of-the-art numerical models treat such processes and examine their ability to quantify hydrate-sourced methane emissions from the seafloor, as well as their impact on benthic biogeochemical cycling. We discuss the limitations of current models in coupling the dynamic interplay between hydrate thermodynamics and the different reaction and transport processes that control the efficiency of the benthic sink, and highlight their shortcoming in assessing the full implication of methane release on ocean carbon cycling. Finally, we recommend that current Earth system models explicitly account for hydrate driven benthic-pelagic exchange fluxes to capture potential hydrate-carbon cycle-climate feed-backs.
benthic methane emissions, carbon cycle-climate feed-backs, climate change, environmental impacts, methane hydrate destabilisation
de la Fuente, Maria
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Arndt, Sandra
1b1fec47-148d-4084-84e9-2abe81d70b91
Marin Moreno, Héctor
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Minshull, Tim A.
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de la Fuente, Maria
1f951d34-a8e3-4018-a564-b852fa00a3f7
Arndt, Sandra
1b1fec47-148d-4084-84e9-2abe81d70b91
Marin Moreno, Héctor
e466cafd-bd5c-47a1-8522-e6938e7086a4
Minshull, Tim A.
bf413fb5-849e-4389-acd7-0cb0d644e6b8
de la Fuente, Maria, Arndt, Sandra, Marin Moreno, Héctor and Minshull, Tim A.
(2022)
Assessing the benthic response to climate-driven methane hydrate destabilisation: state of the art and future modelling perspectives.
Energies, 15 (9), [3307].
(doi:10.3390/en15093307).
Abstract
Modern observations and geological records suggest that anthropogenic ocean warming could destabilise marine methane hydrate, resulting in methane release from the seafloor to the ocean-atmosphere, and potentially triggering a positive feedback on global temperature. On the decadal to millennial timescales over which hydrate-sourced methane release is hypothesized to occur, several processes consuming methane below and above the seafloor have the potential to slow, reduce or even prevent such release. Yet, the modulating effect of these processes on seafloor methane emissions remains poorly quantified, and the full impact of benthic methane consumption on ocean carbon chemistry is still to be explored. In this review, we document the dynamic interplay between hydrate thermodynamics, benthic transport and biogeochemical reaction processes, that ultimately determines the impact of hydrate destabilisation on seafloor methane emissions and the ocean carbon cycle. Then, we provide an overview of how state-of-the-art numerical models treat such processes and examine their ability to quantify hydrate-sourced methane emissions from the seafloor, as well as their impact on benthic biogeochemical cycling. We discuss the limitations of current models in coupling the dynamic interplay between hydrate thermodynamics and the different reaction and transport processes that control the efficiency of the benthic sink, and highlight their shortcoming in assessing the full implication of methane release on ocean carbon cycling. Finally, we recommend that current Earth system models explicitly account for hydrate driven benthic-pelagic exchange fluxes to capture potential hydrate-carbon cycle-climate feed-backs.
Text
energies-15-03307-v2
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More information
Accepted/In Press date: 28 April 2022
e-pub ahead of print date: 1 May 2022
Additional Information:
Acknowledgments: we thank Paul Wilson, Eelco Rohling, Bablu Sinha and Tina Treude for their contributions to the original development of the project that became FIESTA. S.A. acknowledges funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agIn Proceedings of the reement no. 77342 (Nunataryuk). H.M.-M. has been supported by NGI through the base funding from the Research Council of Norway. Computational resources have been provided by the Consortium des Équipements de Calcul Intensif (CÉCI), funded by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique de Belgique (F.R.S.-FNRS Grant No. 2.5020.11) and by the Walloon Region.
Funding Information: this research was funded by the FNRS research project FIESTA (ID: 9617).
Keywords:
benthic methane emissions, carbon cycle-climate feed-backs, climate change, environmental impacts, methane hydrate destabilisation
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 468473
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/468473
ISSN: 1996-1073
PURE UUID: dea56048-fd35-4be0-9848-a2d0bdf3fcd8
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Date deposited: 16 Aug 2022 16:37
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 04:19
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Author:
Maria de la Fuente
Author:
Sandra Arndt
Author:
Héctor Marin Moreno
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