Warmer global temperatures seem to come with a never-ending list of negative consequences.

Recent research from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks (UAF) discovered that the gradual melting of underwater perma frost in the Arctic Ocean was causing the release of methane gas at double the rate previously predicted, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Though carbon dioxide accounts for most of the world's greenhouse emissions (84 percent in 2011), methane absorbs ultraviolet radiation much more efficiently; its per molecule effects are actually twenty times greater than carbon dioxide over 100 years, according to the EPA.

UAF researchers Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov, who've been studying greenhouse emissions in the Arctic Ocean for the last twenty years, said methane levels were most likely even higher as their reported numbers were conservatively reported.

"We decided to be as conservative as possible," Shakhova told the Chronicle. "We're actually talking the top of the iceberg. What we're observing right now is much faster than what we anticipated and much faster than what was modeled."

Methane underneath the bottom of the Arctic Ocean used to be methane underneath the surface of the Bering Land Bridge around 7,000 to 15,000 years ago, which once connected Alaska to Siberia and has since been flooded, according to the Chronicle. A layer of perma frost prevented the gas from leaking, but that layer, now submerged, has melted at a much faster rate than previously thought possible. As more methane is released, a positive feedback is looped: higher temperatures lead to more methane being released; more methane being released increases global temperatures.

Shakhova and Semiletov believe the Artic is sometimes overlooked when it comes to global warming research.

"When something is warming, when warming occurs, what, do you think, part of the globe will be affected first?" Shakhova said. "The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. ... This is what affects the number of cyclones. This is what affects the sea ice, which is shrinking."