Contention and what about Methane?

There seems to be a little bit of contention in these findings where some scientists say the Antarctica ice is melting, but it likely has to do with the fact that Antarctica is a tremendously different place and contains a lot more ice than the Artic, holding approximately 90 percent of the world's ice. Maybe it's like the difference between a small pile of snow in my driveway and one of those huge ones piled up in a mall parking lot; the same conditions cause melting, but the parking lot pile looks unaffected after one warm day.

In other scary news coming from all this ice melt, it seems that there is a tremendous amount of methane trapped in the Artic ice, and as it melts, into the atmosphere it goes. We hear about methane production coming from the digestive processes of our cattle, but don't really think about the billions of tons trapped in the permafrost of the Artic. Though methane presently contributes to the total greenhouse effect 4-9%, it has somewhere in the neighborhood of more than 20 times the greenhouse effect for the same given volume than CO2 causes.

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