Glimpse of the Future
We Just Learned More About How Greenhouse Gas Escapes the Ocean
New research suggests the moon has a role to play
Every week, Future Human’s Glimpse of the Future brings you an image of the science being deployed to solve the world’s pressing problems.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that often gets blamed on decomposing organic waste and cow emissions (burps, not farts). Those are two important sources of methane, but they’re not the only ones contributing to climate change. Scientists in Norway recently investigated methane escaping from the sea floor off the coast of Svalbard, deep beneath the Arctic Ocean.
While it’s well known that there’s methane under the sea — usually produced by decomposing organic matter and trapped in sediment or ice crystals — the way it escapes from the ocean floor and bubbles up into the atmosphere isn’t well understood. That’s because, in part, it’s difficult and expensive to do research in the deep sea. Especially in the Arctic.
But a team from Norway’s Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate (CAGE) recently took up the challenge using a piezometer, a device that monitors the changing pressure of gases and liquids, as they described in a recent paper in Nature Communications. The…
