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![]() ![]() “In the seasonally flooded part of the Amazon, the trees become a massive chimney for pumping out methane.” Emissions from individual trees were more than 200 times higher than any previously measured anywhere. “We found a consistent story that the trees all emit a lot of methane,” she says. In 2017, Pangala published the findings from her Amazon expedition, during which she had travelled its tributaries and flooded forests, taking measurements of methane from surface water, floating aquatic plants, soils, and the stems and leaves of almost 2,400 trees in 13 floodplain locations. They just weren’t interested.”īut the results kept coming. Despite finding that the trees increased standard estimates of emissions from the swamps sevenfold, “it took 18 months to get it published,” she says. When Pangala, then also at The Open University, made her first measurements of trees emitting methane in the swamps of Borneo, she had the same experience. “When I was first working on this, it was poo-pooed,” he says. It only slowly dawned on anyone that trees might do both.Īmong the first was Vincent Gauci, then at the UK’s Open University and now at Birmingham University. Similarly, climate scientists saw forests as absorbing methane, rather than releasing it. Perhaps they feared a rerun of the furor in 1981, when Ronald Reagan used research on the discovery of volatile organic compounds from trees to falsely claim that they “cause more pollution than automobiles.” They were not keen to hear that trees might not be quite as good for the climate as they hoped. Yet “it was only about a decade ago that scientists thought to measure whether methane was actually emitting from trees growing in forests,” says Patrick Megonigal of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland, a pioneer in the work.įor a while, few forest researchers wanted to know. The first recorded measurements were made in 1907, when Francis Bushong of the University of Kansas cut a campus cottonwood and found the gas coming off was 60 percent methane. But in a world where corporations plant trees to offset their carbon emissions, we badly need to know if their numbers add up, or if they are undermined by the complex chemistry of trees and methane.įorest scientists have long amused their students by cutting holes in tree bark and setting fire to gases hissing from the trunk. Indeed, in most cases, their carbon storage capability easily outweighs their methane emissions. ![]() Nobody is arguing that trees are therefore bad for climate and should be cut down. It now seems that most of the world’s estimated 3 trillion trees emit methane at least some of the time. And she had discovered a hitherto ignored major source of the second most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. ![]() ![]() Her 2014 expedition plugged a gaping hole in the planet’s methane budget. She found that trees, especially in the extensive flooded forests, were stimulating methane production in the waterlogged soils and mainlining it into the atmosphere. Then Sunitha Pangala, a British post-doc researcher, spent two months traveling the Amazon’s waterways strapping gas-measuring equipment to thousands of trees. Around 20 million tons was simply unaccounted for. Until recently, one of the most troubling was the vast methane emissions emerging from the rainforest that were observed by satellites but that nobody could find on the ground. ![]()
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