"Warming climate - rainfall - methane emissions - getting hotter - more rainfall - methane emissions accelerating..." This feedback loop may be another ominous sign of global warming .
If carbon dioxide is the oven that continues to bake the Earth, then methane is a blast from it: a stronger but shorter-lived greenhouse gas . It is responsible for about 1/3 of the 1.2 degrees Celsius warming of the earth since the industrial era.. Methane levels in the atmosphere have risen by nearly 7% since 2006, with the past two years seeing the biggest jump yet, even as the pandemic slowed oil and natural gas production, which may have also reduced methane releases. Now, researchers are looking for the cause of this mysterious surge.
They tracked microbes in tropical wetlands. This is because methane in the atmosphere is increasingly rich in carbon-12, the lighter isotope of carbon, and microorganisms are the source and evidence - they react with the light carbon, giving the methane they produce a unique light characteristics. Most climate scientists already agree that much of the post-2006 methane surge did not come from fossil fuels.
of South Sudan The Suder Swamp is the largest swamp on the African continent, and since 2019 it has become a hotspot for methane releases, adding around 13 million tonnes of methane to the atmosphere every year - more than the world’s annual emissions. 2%. Researchers believe climate change may determine the rate of methane emissions from East African wetlands, the Amazon and boreal forests - fueling this trend by increasing rainfall in the region.
Researchers found that satellite data on methane emissions from East Africa from 2010 to 2019 are synchronized with temperature patterns in the Indian Ocean, which periodically warm waters near the Horn of Africa, leading to increased rainfall on land. climate predictions show that as the world continues to warm, wetland areas will emit more methane and become hotspots of heat-trapping gases. This, in turn, increases climate warming and rainfall - a positive feedback loop .
