Science: Just below the freezing Antarctic ice shelves, researchers have discovered a gas leak that could change the region's climate destiny.
For the first time, scientists have detected an active leak of methane gas — a greenhouse gas with 25 times more climate-warming potential than carbon dioxide — in Antarctic waters. While underwater methane leaks have been detected previously all over the world, hungry microbes help keep that leakage in check by gobbling up the gas before too much can escape into the atmosphere.
The study authors found that methane-eating microbes took roughly five years to respond to the Antarctic leak, and even then they did not consume the gas completely.
Handpicked Topics For You:
"The delay [in methane consumption] is the most important finding," Thurber, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University, told The Guardian. "It is not good news."
Methane is a byproduct of ancient, decomposing matter buried below the seafloor or trapped in polar permafrost. Climate change is already causing some of that permafrost to melt, slowly releasing the vast stores of greenhouse gases underground. However, the impacts of underwater methane leaks remain poorly studied, especially in the inhospitable Antarctic, simply because they're hard to find, Thurber said.
- The recent leak - located about 30 feet (10 meters) below the Ross Sea, near Southern Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf — was discovered by chance when civilian divers happened to swim by in 2011.
When Thurber and his colleagues visited the site later that year, the seafloor showed telltale signs of a methane leak: white "mats" of microorganisms that exist in a symbiotic relationship with methane-consuming microbes stretched out in a 200-foot-long (70 m) line along the seafloor.
Continue Reading in Live science...
0 Comments