OSLO (Reuters) – Large amounts of a powerful greenhouse gas are bubbling up from a long-frozen seabed north of Siberia, raising fears of far bigger leaks that could stoke global warming, scientists said.

It was unclear, however, if the Arctic emissions of methane gas were new or had been going on unnoticed for centuries -- since before the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century led to wide use of fossil fuels that are blamed for climate change.

The study said about 8 million tonnes of methane a year, equivalent to the annual total previously estimated from all of the world's oceans,
were seeping from vast stores long trapped under permafrost below the
seabed north of Russia.

"Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap," Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska,
said in a statement. She co-led the study published in Friday's edition
of the journal Science.

The experts measured levels of methane, a gas that can be released by rotting vegetation, in water and air at 5,000 sites on the East
Siberian Arctic Shelf from 2003-08. In some places, methane was
bubbling up from the seabed.

Previously, the sea floor had been considered an impermeable barrier sealing methane, Shakhova said. Current methane concentrations in the
Arctic are the highest in 400,000 years.

GLOBAL WARMING

"No one can answer this question," she said of whether the venting was caused by global warming or by natural factors. But a projected rise in
temperatures could quicken the thaw.

"It's good that these emissions are documented. But you cannot say they're increasing," Martin Heimann, an expert at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany who wrote a separate article on methane in Science, told Reuters.

"These leaks could have been occurring all the time" since the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, he said. He wrote that the release of 8 million
tonnes of methane a year was "negligible" compared to global emissions
of about 440 million tonnes.

Shakhova's study said there was an "urgent need" to monitor the region for possible future changes since permafrost traps vast amounts of
methane, the second most common greenhouse gas from human activities after carbon dioxide.

Monitoring could resolve if the venting was "a steadily ongoing phenomenon or signals the start of a more massive release period,"
according to the scientists, based at U.S., Russian and Swedish research institutions.

The release of just a "small fraction of the methane held in (the) East Siberian Arctic Shelf sediments could trigger abrupt climate warming," they wrote.

The shelf has sometimes been above sea level during the earth's history. When submerged, temperatures rise by 12-17 degrees Celsius
(22-31 F) since water is warmer than air. Over thousands of years, that
may thaw submerged permafrost.

About 60 percent of methane now comes from human activities such as landfills, cattle rearing or rice paddies. Natural sources such as
wetlands make up the rest, along with poorly understood sources such as
the oceans, wildfires or termites.

Most studies about methane focus on permafrost on land. But the shelf below the Laptev, East Siberian and Russian part of the Chuckchi sea is
three times the size of Siberia's wetlands.