NASA's Curiosity rover has come up empty - handed in its search
for methane in the atmosphere of Mars, researchers report September 19 in Science.
On March 19, 2008, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope announced confirmation of the presence of water and the detection of
more methane in the atmosphere of HD 189733's planet than would be predicted by conventional atmospheric models for such a hot Jupiter - class planet (Hubble news release and videos; ESA news release and videos; and Swain et al, 2008).
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.
But scientists who track
methane in the atmosphere in the Arctic and elsewhere around the planet see no big surge that can be pinned on such releases.
Huygens will
sample methane in the atmosphere and measure the relative abundance of light hydrogen and heavy hydrogen to produce a chemical fingerprint that will enable scientists to compare Titan's composition with that of comets.
Another EDF - funded study is also underway in Boston, where Harvard University professor Steven Wofsy and others are working to use measurements of
methane in the atmosphere above the city to determine how much of the gas is being released.
Mission scientists speculate that
perhaps methane in the atmosphere on Pluto behaves like water in the air on Earth, building up on the ground as frost at the highest (and coldest) elevations.
The scientists drove across the southern United States and measured levels of
methane in the atmosphere along the many roads and highways upon which they traveled.
Oleg Anisimov has calculated that, in the next 50 years, sustained thawing of Russian permafrost will increase the overall content of
methane in the atmosphere by just 0.04 ppm and lead to a relatively low global temperature rise of 0.012 °C.
First, the main chemical that reacts
with methane in the atmosphere is the hydroxyl radical (OH), thus more methane means that the concentration of OH goes down.
To crunch its numbers, the EPA calculated the average concentration of
methane in the atmosphere over a 100 - year period and determined that over that period methane is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
A clearer atmosphere means better opportunity for Rayleigh scattering, the process that turns our own atmosphere blue, and
for methane in the atmosphere to absorb the red rays of the sun.
According to their models,
methane in the atmosphere of an anoxic Earth - like planet would typically react with the carbon dioxide that still filled the air, mingling further with another ubiquitous gas, nitrogen, as well as water vapor to ultimately rain out as heavier compounds.
Scientists are still working to better understand the sources of increasing levels of methane in the atmosphere
Only the planet orbiting the sunlike star gave hints of
methane in its atmosphere.
Others using the secondary eclipse technique have detected evidence for water vapor and
methane in the atmosphere of HD 189733 b.
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.
If other large cities with older infrastructures are leaking on a scale comparable to Washington, D.C — and Jackson's group has similar data from Boston that suggests they are — leaky city pipes make a significant contribution to
methane in the atmosphere.
Finds like that, along with sediment cores and ice cores that show how the amount of
methane in the atmosphere and ocean has fluctuated dramatically in the past, have led to a slew of «methane burp» theories.
Instead, the most likely explanation has less to do with methane emissions and more to do with changes in the availability of the hydroxyl (OH) radical, which breaks down
methane in the atmosphere.
Nonetheless, the rover found no sign of
methane in the atmosphere, dashing hopes that methane - producing microbes might still dwell there now.
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.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and it is important to understand the various sources of
methane in the atmosphere.
They found that most of
the methane in the atmosphere around Boston comes from natural gas delivered to the area for heating and cooking.