NASA scientists use a ToolThe study was designed to determine how dust affects climate. It has identified over 50 locations around the globe that emit large amounts of methane. This could be a breakthrough in the fight against this potent greenhouse gas.
”Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a Press releaseTuesday
”This exciting new development will not only help researchers better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also provide insight on how they can be addressed – quickly.”
NASA said its Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) is designed to foster understanding of the effects of airborne dust on climate.
But EMIT, which was installed on the International Space Station in July and can focus on areas as small as a soccer field, has also shown the ability to detect the presence of methane.
NASA said more than 50 “super-emitters” of methane gas in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the southwestern United States have been identified so far. Many of them are linked to the agricultural, fossil-fuel or waste sectors.
Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate advisor, EMIT’s additional methane-detecting ability offers remarkable opportunities to monitor and measure greenhouse gas emissions that are contributing to global warming. Climate Change.”
”Exceeds our expectations”
Around 30 percent of the global temperature rise to date has been caused by methane.
While far less abundant in the atmosphere than CO2On a century-long timeline, it is approximately 28 times as powerful as a greenhouse gases. It is 80 times more powerful over a 20-year period.
Methane lingers in the atmosphere for only a decade, compared to hundreds or thousands of years for CO2.
This means a sharp reduction in emissions could shave several tenths of a degree Celsius off of projected global warming by mid-century, helping keep alive the Paris Agreement goal of capping Earth’s average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
”EMIT will potentially find hundreds of super-emitters – some of them previously spotted through air-, space-, or ground-based measurement, and others that were unknown,” NASA .
Andrew Thorpe, a research technologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory leading the EMIT methane effort, some of the methane plumes detected by EMIT are among the largest ever seen.
”What we’ve found in a just a short time already exceeds our expectations,” Thorpe said.
NASA said a methane plume about 2 miles (3.3 kilometers) long was detected southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the Permian Basin, one of the largest oilfields in the world.
It said 12 plumes from oil and gas infrastructure were identified in Turkmenistan, east of the Caspian Sea port city of Hazar.
A methane plume at least 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) long was detected south of Tehran from a major waste-processing complex, NASA said.
