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Amount of Methane Emitted by Human Activity has been Vastly Underestimated – AZoCleantech

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Methane is known to be a potent greenhouse gas and contributes considerably to global warming. In the past three centuries, emissions of this gas in the air have increased by around 150%.

Image Credit: University of Rochester photo/Benjamin Hmiel.

Despite this fact, researchers have found it difficult to precisely establish the origin of these emissions; heat-trapping gases such as methane can be produced naturally, and also from human activity.

At the University of Rochester, Benjamin Hmiel, a researcher and postdoctoral associate in the laboratory of Vasilii Petrenko, a professor of earth and environmental sciences, and colleagues quantified the levels of methane present in old air samples. They discovered that investigators have been largely underestimating the amount of methane that is emitted by humans into the air through fossil fuels.

In a study published in the Nature journal, the scientists indicated that decreasing the use of fossil fuels is a major target in mitigating climate change.

Placing stricter methane emission regulations on the fossil fuel industry will have the potential to reduce future global warming to a larger extent than previously thought.

Benjamin Hmiel, Researcher and Postdoctoral Associate, University of Rochester

Two Types of Methane

Methane happens to be the second-largest anthropogenic after carbon dioxide (CO2) gas and originates from human activity. It plays a major role in global warming.

However, methane has a comparatively short shelf-life when compared to CO2 and other heat-trapping gases. On average, methane persists in the atmosphere only for nine years, while CO2, for example, can last for approximately 100 years in the air. That renders methane a particularly suitable target for mitigating the levels of emission in a short period of time.

If we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide today, high carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would still persist for a long time. Methane is important to study because if we make changes to our current methane emissions, it’s going to reflect more quickly.

Benjamin Hmiel, Researcher and Postdoctoral Associate, University of Rochester

Methane discharged into the air can be divided into two categories, depending on its carbon-14 signature; carbon-14 is a rare radioactive isotope.

Fossil methane in historic hydrocarbon deposits has been sequestered for millions of years and does not contain carbon-14 anymore because this isotope has decomposed. But carbon-14 is present in biological methane, which comes into contact with flora and fauna on the surface of the planet.

Biological methane can be naturally discharged from sources like wetlands or through anthropogenic sources like livestock, rice fields, and landfills.

The focus of Hmiel’s work is fossil methane. This gas can be discharged through natural geologic seeps or due to humans’ extraction and utilization of fossil fuels such as coal, gas, and oil.

Researchers are able to precisely measure the overall amount of methane discharged into the atmosphere every year; however, it is very hard to break down this total amount of gas into its separate components: Which parts are biological and which portions emerge from fossil sources? What is the level of methane emitted naturally, and how much of this gas is discharged by human activity?

As a scientific community we’ve been struggling to understand exactly how much methane we as humans are emitting into the atmosphere. We know that the fossil fuel component is one of our biggest component emissions, but it has been challenging to pin that down because in today’s atmosphere, the natural and anthropogenic components of the fossil emissions look the same, isotopically.

Vasilii Petrenko, Study Co-Author and Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Rochester

Turning to the Past

Hmiel and his collaborators turned to the past to more precisely isolate the anthropogenic and natural components. They did this by drilling and obtaining ice cores from Greenland. The samples of ice core behave just like time capsules: they include air bubbles with trace amounts of old air trapped within.

Using a melting chamber, the scientists collected the ancient air from the bubbles and subsequently analyzed its chemical composition.

While Hmiel’s study expands on earlier work performed by Petrenko, it is focused on quantifying the air composition from the early 18th century—that is, before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution—to the current day.

It was only until the mid-19th century that humans started to use large amounts of fossil fuels. Quantifying the levels of emission before this time period enables scientists to detect the natural emissions, without the emissions resulting from fossil fuels that exist in the present-day atmosphere. There is no proof to indicate that natural emissions from fossil methane can differ over the duration of a few centuries.

By quantifying the isotopes of carbon-14 in the atmosphere from over two centuries ago, the team discovered that virtually all the methane discharged into the air was biological in nature until around 1870. That is when the component of the fossil began to increase quickly. The timing matches with a sudden increase in the usage of fossil fuels.

The levels of naturally emitted fossil methane are around 10 times lower when compared to earlier studies reported.

Considering the total fossil emissions quantified in the air currently, Hmiel and his collaborators inferred that the artificial fossil component is more than anticipated—25% to 40% higher was discovered by the team.

Climate Change Implications

This information has major implications for climate studies—if emissions of anthropogenic methane constitute a bigger part of the total, then decreasing emissions from human activities, such as the extraction and use of fossil fuels, will have a much larger effect on mitigating upcoming global warming than previously believed by researchers.

That is actually good news for Hmiel. “I don’t want to get too hopeless on this because my data does have a positive implication: most of the methane emissions are anthropogenic, so we have more control. If we can reduce our emissions, it’s going to have more of an impact,” he added.

The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and is the latest example of the University of Rochester’s initiatives to further interpret the budget of global methane.

Researchers from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences of the University of Rochester have carried out field studies in Earth’s oceans, the Great Lakes, Greenland, and Antarctica. They have utilized climate models and machine learning to develop an understanding of the powerful greenhouse gas methane and the ways it impacts climate change and global warming.

Source: https://www.rochester.edu/

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.

Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.

Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.

Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.

Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.

“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”

The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.

North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.

Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”

Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.

Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.

For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.

“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.

On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.

They call it “Big Sam.”

The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

It didn’t die alone.

“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.

She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”

“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.

The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.

The discovery was a long time coming.

The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.

“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.

When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”

“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.

Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.

About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.

Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.

“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.

“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”

The genders of the two adults are unknown.

Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.

The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.

She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.

“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.

“It’s pretty exciting.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.

Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.

Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.

The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.

It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.

Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.

Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.

Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.

The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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