Thermokarst Lake Methane Ebullition

Thawing permafrost beneath Arctic thermokarst lakes feeds old, previously frozen carbon to methane-producing microbes in the lakebed sediment, and much of that gas escapes not by slow diffusion but as bubbles erupting from concentrated seep hotspots — ebullition. This simulator tracks individual bubbles rising from seep points on the lake floor: their speed depends on radius through a viscous-drag/turbulent-wake transition, and they steadily lose gas to dissolution the longer they spend in the water column, so only bubbles that start large enough or begin close enough to the surface make it out. Switch on winter ice cover to see what happens to the survivors once the lake seals over — they can no longer vent to air and instead freeze into stacked bubble towers under the ice, a real, often-photographed signature that field researchers use to locate seeps from above.