Cows are a red herring. The most dangerous potential source for methane release lies underneath thinning permafrost and glaciers in the Arctic. Ecologists have just mapped the seeps where methane is bubbling up, and they found more than 150,000 of them.

Methane is a seriously potent greenhouse gas. Compared to a single molecule of carbon dioxide, methane is 25 times stronger, according to Katey Walter Anthony, an aquatic ecosystem ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who led the new mapping research. She and her colleagues just published their findings in Nature Geoscience (abstract).

You might know Walter Anthony from YouTube videos, where she and her students illustrate methane release by stabbing pockets frozen in an Alaskan lake and setting the gas on fire. That lake thaws every summer and then winter ice covers the gas bubbles, trapping them. Far thicker caps have been trapping methane year-round in the Arctic, but little was known about how they were holding up. Until now.

Walter Anthony and her colleagues combined Arctic aerial survey data with ground-based measurements to document widespread methane seeps along melting glaciers and permafrost for the first time. They looked at both superficial methane seepage from shallow lakes and wetland, as well […]