In April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that 2021 had seen a record increase in atmospheric methane – a harmful greenhouse gas known to contribute to global warming and therefore all the devastating consequences that come with it.
Consequences such as intense cyclones and floods that destroy people’s homes and lead to a staggering number of deaths. Like forest fires that ravage entire cities and increase the risk of cancer.
What is striking is that this marked the second year in a row that such a massive methane spike has occurred since scientists began tracking levels of the chemical in 1983. And to make matters worse, the disturbing pattern stems from the fact that fossil fuel production, biomass burning, poor waste management and other human activities produce a lot of methane – yet these activities have intensified across the world.
In other words, the way we burn coal to generate energy and develop huge landfills to store our waste is at the heart of the problem.
To figure out where exactly our methane emissions are coming from — so we can try to plug in the biggest sources — NASA repurposed an International Space Station mission to observe Earth and identify our planet’s methane hotspots. .
Called Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation – named after its original work studying the impact of dust on our climate – but also known as EMIT, the company has found more than 50 of what the NASA calls methane “super-emitters”. These super-emitters include facilities, equipment, and other man-made infrastructure related to the fossil fuel, waste, and agriculture industries.
“The new observations stem from the wide coverage of the planet afforded by the space station’s orbit, as well as EMIT’s ability to scan swathes of the Earth’s surface tens of kilometers wide while resolving areas as small as a football field,” NASA said.
EMIT scientists essentially took the mission’s spectral data, which reveals the chemical fingerprints of specific molecules on Earth from a bird’s eye view, and gleaned clues about methane’s signature. Methane turned out to be in the spectral range for which EMIT was calibrated, so the inference happened naturally.
“We were excited to see how EMIT’s mineral data will improve climate modeling,” Kate Calvin, NASA chief scientist and senior climate adviser, said in a statement. “This additional methane sensing capability provides a remarkable opportunity to measure and monitor greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.”
Earth’s Methane Culprits
In total, the EMIT data found more than five dozen superemitters in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the southwestern United States.
The mission’s instruments detected, for example, a methane plume about 3.3 kilometers southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the Permian Basin. It’s probably because this region is home to one of the largest oil fields in the world, stretching from this part of New Mexico to western Texas. At this site, the team estimated a staggering methane flow rate of around 40,300 pounds (18,300 kilograms) per hour.
Near Tehran, Iran, a methane plume stretched at least 3 miles across the landscape near a major landfill. This spot appeared to indicate a throughput of 111,000 pounds (50,400 kilograms) per hour.
In Turkmenistan, the agency said, EMIT detected 12 separate plumes from oil and gas facilities east of the port city of Hazar on the Caspian Sea. As they blew in the westerly wind, some of these puffs of methane extended for 20 miles. This location, according to a NASA press release, revealed a throughput of 18,700 pounds per hour.
“Some of the plumes detected by EMIT are among the largest ever seen – unlike anything ever seen from space,” said Andrew Thorpe, a NASA researcher who leads the EMIT methane effort. in a press release. “What we have found in a short time already exceeds our expectations.”
And that only scratches the surface of what the team found – more what they might find in the future.
Now that it has proven its strengths with areas known to produce a lot of methane, EMIT is ready to observe places where no one has thought before to search for greenhouse gas emitters and find plumes we never expected. maybe not. Hopefully this will reveal some secret culprits of global warming.
Or, as NASA puts it, “With repeated broad coverage from its vantage point on the space station, EMIT will potentially find hundreds of superemitters – some of them already spotted by aerial, space or earthly, and others that were unknown.”
“Containing methane emissions is key to limiting global warming. This exciting new development will not only help researchers better determine where methane leaks are coming from, but will also provide insight into how they can be addressed – quickly,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.
Later, the mission’s spectrometer could also look for other greenhouse gases: the fingerprint of carbon dioxide – another man-made chemical that contributes to the warming of our planet – is also in the EMIT wavelength range.
“These results are exceptional, and they demonstrate the value of combining a global-scale perspective with the resolution required to identify point sources of methane, down to the facility scale,” said David Thompson, EMIT Instrument Scientist and NASA Principal Investigator, in a statement.
“It’s a unique capability that will raise the bar for efforts to attribute methane sources and mitigate emissions from human activities.”
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