Comment on “Understanding the Permafrost–Hydrate System and Associated Methane Releases in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf”

• Published in: Geosciences
• Main Authors: Brett F. Thornton, Marc C. Geibel, Patrick M. Crill, Christoph Humborg, Carl-Magnus Mörth
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019
• Subjects: methane; East Siberian Arctic Shelf; laptev sea; East Siberian Sea; methane hydrates; Geology; QE1-996.5; Arctic; Laptev Sea; laptev; permafrost
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences9090384; https://doaj.org/article/27d91ce61c2e475b8743345306e4f507

The recent paper in Geosciences , “Understanding the Permafrost−Hydrate System and Associated Methane Releases in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf” by Shakhova, Semiletov, and Chuvilin, (henceforth “S2019”), contains a number of false statements about our 2016 paper, “Methane fluxes from the sea to the atmosphere across the Siberian shelf seas”, (henceforth “T2016”). S2019 use three paragraphs of section 5 of their paper to claim methodological errors and issues in T2016. Notably they claim that in T2016, we systematically removed data outliers including data with high methane concentrations; this claim is false. While we appreciate that flawed methodologies can be a problem in any area of science, in this case, the claims made in S2019 are simply false. In this comment, we detail the incorrect claims made in S2019 regarding T2016, and then discuss some additional problematic aspects of S2019.