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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
Methane is a greenhouse gas that traps heat even better than carbon dioxide. It comes from a variety of sources, including fossil fuel production and even farming. Cows give off methane, ya know, after they eat. Even the surface waters of the ocean contain substantial amounts of this gas. But where that marine methane comes was a mystery. Until now.
Scientists collected seawater off the coast of Hawaii. And they found that bacteria that live in these waters scarf up certain phosphorous-containing chemicals, and then release methane as a byproduct. The results appear online in the journal Nature Geoscience. What’s surprising is that scientists had previously thought that methane’s only produced by bacteria that live in places where there’s no oxygen, think of the smell you associate with a swamp or with the muck at the bottom of a murky pond. This marine methane could contribute to global warming by adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. What’s worse, the hotter it is, the more stressed these seafaring bacteria get, and the more methane they’re likely to put out. Which was certainly not the kind of feedback that atmospheric scientists were hoping to get.
—Karen Hopkin
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4 Comments
Add CommentI'm disappointed with the comment that marine bacteria are significant contribution to greenhouse gas. Not only can you not draw that type of conclusion from an observation paper like this but making such an assertion takes attention off the true causes of global warming, human produced CO2 emissions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome time ago I watched some nature program that was describing a massive upwelling of methane gases off the west coast of Africa. The scientists involved tracked down the cause as overfishing. The reduced populations of fish were no longer eating the plankton, krill & so on, that resulted in an organic sediment building up on the sea floor. Forty years ago there was serious debate about how many people our planet could reasonably support, this now seems completely off the
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would agree that it might be presumptuous to say that this is a major contirbution to green house gasses, but it might be. I don't believe it takes attention off of CO2 and it brings up another point... we probably shouldn't stress these bacteria if we want to have low methane levels.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAstounding. Biogenic methane. In the ocean no less. Better stop the presses and form a new sub-committee of the IPCC to investigate which US corporation is responsible and deal with them severely. And let's not take our eye off the real culprit, CO2.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReally, though people, the ocean has been generating methane for ages upon ages. This is just another article attempting to dress up someone's research (which may have scientific validity in and of it's own right) in the cloak of AGW and justify more funding. I speak from experience in that did just that on more than one occasion myself until I couldn't stomach it anymore.