paper says tropical wetland microbial action, so not clathrates yet, no.

i'm looking at figure 3 in the academic source.

delta carbon-13 is a measure of the ratio of carbon-12 vs. carbon-13 in a sample, in this case in samples of atmospheric methane gas. the lower the value, the fewer carbon-13 isotopes there are relative to carbon-12 isotopes. carbon-13 is stable, it doesn't radioactively decay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Δ13C

so if you can date samples of atmosphere trapped in ice cores and measure the amount and isotopic composition of the methane then you can construct a graph like that figure 3. different processes result in distinct isotopic signatures for the methane released into the atmosphere. what their chart shows is that from about 1100 c.e. to 1900 c.e. the delta carbon-13 ratio dropped by about 2 per-mil while atmospheric methane concentration rose, which they attribute to a decrease in biomass burning sources of methane and an increase in agricultural sources of methane.

then in 1900 c.e. there's a big increase in atmospheric methane along with a big increase in delta carbon-13. fossil fuel sources of methane are much heavier than natural sources, so as trapped methane was released into the atmosphere it produced a sharp change in the isotopic ratio.

but then about 15 years ago the isotopic signature sharply reversed course even as methane concentration started suddenly rising more rapidly. so something weird is going on these past two decades where we've possibly already started feedback loops that result in releasing trapped permafrost methane, for example. the paper suggests it's mostly from tropical wetlands, but the focus of the paper is on the isotopic observations.

that delta carbon-13 curve is unsettling

check out this neat bag someone gave me to hold!

it's a description that's both vivid and accurate

is good!

a few of mieville's books are set in his weird fantasy steampunk world. one of the characters is a species of beetle, where the males are just beetles but the females have beetle heads but humanoid bodies, and she's in a relationship with a human character. someone here described his books as he introduces you to these fascinating characters that you quickly care for, and then he spends most of the novel staring you straight in the eye while putting all of them very slowly through a meat grinder. because they also live in a capitalist hellscape.

i was going to ask if this is inspired by perdido street station

in north korea our clothing must cover our entire legs, and if we wear shorts they cut your lower legs off so that now your legs are just as short as your shorts!

born with a tepid, grey heart, myself

happy to help

as @forcequit@hexbear.net said, it's a parody of the lemmy dot world admin announcement regarding their decision to preemptively defederate from hexbear.net shortly before we joined the lemmyverse. hexbeat.net is a lemmy instance created a little over 3 years ago before federation was even a feature, and it quickly forked for a variety of reasons and it's only recently that our glorious devs completed the merger with lemmy and gave us the ability to federate.

chapo.chat is the original name for hexbear.net, it was changed about a year into the site's existence. so the joke here is that @Koolio@hexbear.net is announcing that we're preemptively defederating from ourselves.

yeah what exactly is going on here? everyone is wearing a different expression and they're all not quite sure how to react to that harpist with john brown's beard

damn, that brings me back to making "bush is a crypto-leftist sleeper agent wrecker" jokes 20 years ago

we have several different flavors of left unity emojis!

nagorno-karabakh is a majority armenian region inside of azerbaijan that has declared itself the largely unrecognized republic of artsakh. n-k is connected to armenia by a road through the mountains called the lachin corridor, after the city of lachin. the ceasefire in 2020 between armenia and azerbaijan established the corridor under nominal russian protection to allow free travel between armenia and n-k. since april, azerbaijan has set up a roadblock/checkpoint along the corridor ostensibly to control illegal transport of military supplies, but which the armenians are calling a blockade. it's a big mess.

so when there's a natural disaster everyone whips out their phones and overload the networks. i'm picturing some years from now, robotaxis everywhere across the city, there's an earthquake and emergency vehicles have to deal with thousands of roadblocks because all the cars bricked themselves when the wifi cut out.

it's an investment in democracy. that means i front the capital and other people do all the work. and in return i get to keep the democracy, which is when i buy up formerly nationalized assets at fire sale prices!

smoke the pot from thine own eyes before helping another passenger with their oxygen mask

https://hexbear.net/post/301217

it's the new normal

Things will be broken. Things will be broken more often. Things will be broken for longer periods of time. Things will be broken in more severe ways. Everything will compound until, eventually, it’s not usable.