With Federal Funds Dwindling, Climate Scientists Turn to Unusual Partnerships to Study Methane in a Warming Arctic
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Figuring out just how much methane is leaving the lakes is crucial. Though less prevalent in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, methane is roughly 30 times more powerful of a heat-trapping gas, and has already accounted for about one-sixth of recent climate warming according to NASA. Moreover, for every degree that Earth’s temperature rises, methane entering the atmosphere from microorganisms in lakes and wetlands is expected to increase—thus worsening the overall problem.
In the Canadian Arctic, this gas builds up in the lakes each winter beneath a thick lid of ice. Come spring, that lid melts and methane escapes into the air above. Multiply this effect over the astonishing 55,000 lakes within this massive delta—one of the largest in the Arctic—and the weight of the greenhouse gas burbling out each year could balloon to as much as 10 teragrams.
For reference, that’s the weight of more than 1 million elephants.
“That would be a very significant part of the global methane flux to the atmosphere just coming from this one delta,” says Beth Orcutt, an oceanographer at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, Maine and one of Wheat’s collaborators.
Orcutt says “would,” because she and her team thinks that climate models may be seriously underestimating the role that methane in this delta plays in global climate warming. As a result, they see their work as having serious urgency. And yet, even as warming in this region speeds up—with roads heaving and communities scrambling to secure their buildings on thawing ground—federal funding for climate research has become harder to come by.