Sentences with phrase «atmosphere by methane»

Not exact matches

As one of the group's leaders, Hsu Jen - hsiu, rightly says eating less or no meat is a way to love our planet because livestock emit large volumes of methane into the atmosphere, which contribute more to global warming than the emissions produced by all the vehicles around the world.

By capturing methane gas from cow manure and using it to generate electrical power, the Straus Dairy Farm prevents a greenhouse gas that is 72 times more detrimental than CO2 within a 20 - year period from getting into the atmosphere, while also creating a renewable energy source.

This marine methane could contribute to global warming by adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

In this study, we created new per - animal emissions factors — that is measures of the average amount of CH4 discharged by animals into the atmosphere — and new estimates of global livestock methane emissions.»

WHEN Stanley Miller and Harold Urey created amino acids by shooting sparks through a «primordial atmosphere» of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water, biologists thought a full understanding of the origins of life was within reach.

Walter sees the benefits of using methane as an energy source as twofold: «Not only does it prevent a potent greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere by converting it to weaker greenhouse gases — water vapor and carbon dioxide — but using it on - site would also reduce the demand for other fossil - fuel sources.»

The Methods: Photochemical modeling by a Caltech team indicates that ethane, a hydrocarbon detected on Titan by both of the Voyager spacecraft and the European Infrared Space Observatory, is created when solar ultraviolet light breaks down methane, a minor component of Titan's nitrogen - rich atmosphere, into a stew of organic molecules that form a dense orange - brown smog.

Hydrates have shaped the history of our planet: by locking away methane produced in the earth's crust instead of allowing it to accumulate in the atmosphere, they helped to make the earth a hospitable place for life.

Titan is Saturn's largest moon, a cryogenically cold world with a surface shaped by hydrocarbon rivers and seas fed by methane, ethane and complex organic compounds raining out of its thick, smoggy atmosphere.

Those trees are going to fall down and rot and turn into methane, which is much worse than carbon dioxide,» he said, noting that by turning wood chips into biofuel, his company would actually be reducing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Oxygen, which would quickly react out of Earth's atmosphere if it weren't continually produced by plants, is closer to a smoking gun, especially if it were seen together with methane.

Of course, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is also affected by another potent greenhouse gas — methane — which has unexpectedly failed to increase in recent years.

Methane is normally held in check by the hydroxyl radical (OH), which scrubs nearly all of it out of the atmosphere within a decade.

Vertical carbon fluxes involve the amount of carbon going from the ground into the atmosphere or from the atmosphere into the ecosystem and will be estimated by measuring fluxes of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), two important greenhouse gases.

By seeing which wavelengths are absorbed as the starlight passes through the planet's atmosphere, astronomers could determine whether the atmosphere contains water, carbon monoxide, methane, and carbon dioxide.

This stability in methane levels had led scientists to believe that emissions of the gas from natural sources like livestock and wetlands, as well as from human activities like coal and gas production, were balanced by the rate of destruction of methane in the atmosphere.

Since methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide, such a scenario would trigger a «climate catastrophe», they say, increasing the methane content of the planet's atmosphere twelve-fold, and raising temperatures by 1.3 ˚C.

Today people are warming the planet by putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and methane too.

IN THE AIR Measurements collected by NASA's Curiosity rover indicate that methane is periodically released into Mars» atmosphere from an unknown source.

A surprising recent rise in atmospheric methane likely stems from wetland emissions, suggesting that much more of the potent greenhouse gas will be pumped into the atmosphere as northern wetlands continue to thaw and tropical ones to warm, according to a new international study led by a University of Guelph researcher.

«It is true that they do warm climate by strong methane emissions when they first form, but on a longer - term scale, they switch to become climate coolers because they ultimately soak up more carbon from the atmosphere than they ever release.»

Our planet was once dominated by methane - producing microorganisms, resulting in an unusual combination of methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which would not have arisen naturally.

In deeper parts of the ocean, the methane released from the ocean floor would likely never make it up to the atmosphere, since it would get used up by microbes before it reached the surface.

Chemists have long sought an efficient, light - driven catalyst to power this reaction, which could help reduce the growing levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere by converting it into methane, a key building block for many types of fuels.

However, Sagan and Christopher Chyba believe organic compounds, formed at high altitudes by the action of solar ultraviolet radiation on methane and ammonia can provide an ultraviolet «shield» to protect the methane and ammonia in the lower atmosphere.

Yet those systems release into the atmosphere low concentrations of methane that could otherwise be processed by existing technologies that oxidize the gas, suggests CATF.

But in recent years chemists have been increasingly concerned that the atmosphere's reservoir of the hydroxyl radical, and hence the efficiency of its «cleansing service», has been overstretched by the build - up of pollutants such as methane, carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide.

While most of the built up methane was consumed by the end of the anoxic period, methane concentrations measured in surface water samples in June and September suggest that there was still a significant flux of methane to the atmosphere.

In contrast, the method used by Miller and his colleagues, called a top - down method, uses measurements of methane in the atmosphere, taken from a national network of greenhouse gas monitoring stations and aircraft measurements conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Energy.

Although the researchers did not examine in this study what prevents methane released from the seafloor from reaching the atmosphere, they suspect it is biodegraded by microorganisms in the ocean before it hits the surface waters.

By employing a technique they developed that involves collecting methane from roughly ten thousand gallons of seawater per sample, they made a surprising discovery: ancient - sourced methane is indeed being released into the ocean; but very little survives to be emitted to the atmosphere, even at surprisingly shallow depths.

The experiment was kicked off by sparks inside a flask containing water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen, all materials believed to have existed in the atmosphere when the Earth was very young.

A recent upsurge in planet - warming methane may not be caused by increasing emissions, as previously thought, but by methane lingering longer in the atmosphere.

Every molecule of methane in the air has 25 times the effect on temperature rise compared to a molecule of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning coal, oil or gas.

The effect dissipates faster, however: airborne methane remains in the atmosphere for about 12 years before being scrubbed out by ongoing chemical reactions, whereas CO2 lasts 30 to 95 years.

Between 80 % and 90 % of methane emitted from rice fields is produced by microbes living on plant roots; some of the gas dissolves into the water and bubbles up, but most is absorbed along with water by plant roots, travels up to the stems and leaves, and escapes into the atmosphere.

This archaeon lives in deep sea vents near Japan, and survives by combining hydrogen and carbon dioxide — both detected in Enceladus's atmosphere — while excreting methane.

Once there it will produce propellant on Mars itself, either by distilling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and mixing it with hydrogen brought from Earth to generate methane and oxygen or by electrolyzing water from the permafrost to make liquid hydrogen and oxygen.

(Methane forms as a by - product of anaerobic bacterial decomposition of organic matter in the soil and reaches the atmosphere through the roots and stems of the rice plants.)

Then in 2003, William Ruddiman, a palaeoclimatologist at the University of Virginia, suggested the advent of agriculture 8000 years ago ramped up levels of the greenhouse gas methane in the atmosphere, warming the world by about 0.8 °C.

A LITTLE GAS The concentration of methane in the Martian atmosphere measured by the rover Curiosity is one ten - thousandth that on Earth.

The activity could be a source replenishing the methane in Titan's atmosphere, which is broken down by sunlight

But in late March, researchers analyzing data from the European Mars Express satellite reported the planet's atmosphere contains traces of methane, a by - product of bacteria here on Earth.

Once formed by either serpentinization or microbes, methane could be stored as a stable clathrate hydrate — a chemical structure that traps methane molecules like animals in a cage — for later release to the atmosphere, perhaps by gradual outgassing through cracks and fissures or by episodic bursts triggered by volcanism.

Lower in the atmosphere, oxygen atoms and hydroxyl radicals (OH), which form when water molecules are broken apart by ultraviolet photons, oxidize methane.

Once produced, methane could have been stored as a stable clathrate hydrate and released to the atmosphere either gradually, through volcanism, or in bursts, triggered by impacts.

Surfing complete21 February 2018 Slowed by skimming through the very top of the upper atmosphere, ESA's ExoMars has lowered itself into a planet - hugging orbit and is about ready to begin sniffing the Red Planet for methane.

Researchers suspect methane could be belched into Titan's atmosphere by cryovolcanism, or volcanoes with water as lava.

Consequently, massive amounts of reactive gases such as oxygen, hydrogen, and methane are continually being added to Earth's now «anomalous» atmosphere faster than they would otherwise be removed by inorganic chemical processes.

HD 189733 A has a Jupiter - class planet in a tight orbit, where methane and water vapor have been detected by filtering the star's light through the planet's atmosphere (more).