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Gas Seepage and Past Climate Change

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Natural Gas Seepage

Abstract

This chapter discusses the “potential” climatic role of hydrocarbon gas seepage in the geological past. Today, total geological methane emissions represent the second largest natural source of methane, following wetlands, and are comparable, in terms of magnitude, to other anthropogenic sources. To understand what happened in the past and whether or not seepage influenced pre-anthropogenic climate change, two important considerations must be taken into account. The first consideration is whether or not it is logical to assume, in the absence of man-made methane sources before the industrial revolution and during pre-anthropogenic time periods (>5,000 years ago), that gas seepage was the second largest methane source in absolute terms and therefore constituted a major control on variations in atmospheric methane burden. The second consideration is whether or not seepage has been constant over geological time periods. Using specific references to Late Quaternary and Cenozoic geological time scale changes, this chapter discusses how seepages, as a result of geological factors that change over time, may have influenced global climate. We obtain a sense of the potential impact of gas seepage on climate over long geological time scales if seepage is considered to be a part of a dynamic carbon cycle, which includes a gigantic reservoir of organic carbon buried in sedimentary basins.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sezione Roma 2, Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Rome, Italy

    Giuseppe Etiope

  2. Faculty of Environmental Science and Engineering, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Giuseppe Etiope

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Etiope, G. (2015). Gas Seepage and Past Climate Change. In: Natural Gas Seepage. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14601-0_8

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