Study says microbes, not fossil fuels, produced most new methane Premium

Naveen Chandra's research on carbon emissions reveals microbes to be the main contributors of new methane, challenging previous assumptions that fossil fuels were responsible.

For the last three years, Naveen Chandra has been spending most of his days running simulations at the Research Institute for Global Change in Japan. He is trying to recreate the last 50 years of the earth’s atmosphere on a supercomputer roughly the size of an auditorium.

Dr. Chandra has been trying to answer a question that came out of his team’s research. During 2019-2020, these researchers examined the concentration of methane in the atmosphere and how it changed with time. Until the 1990s, the concentration increased, then stabilised for a bit, and then started to increase again around 2007. According to recent estimates, the atmospheric concentration of methane today is three-times what it was 300 years ago.

Where is this methane coming from? That’s what they wanted to know.

Evolving understanding

Methane is the second most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide (CO2) but it warms the planet more. Over a century, methane has a global warming potential 28-times greater than CO2, and even higher over shorter periods like two decades.

It wasn’t until recently that policymakers began to focus on methane vis-a-vis addressing global warming. At the U.N. climate talks in 2021, member countries launched the ‘Global Methane Pledge’ to cut the gas’s emissions and slow the planet’s warming. Yet our understanding of methane also continues to evolve.

For instance, Dr. Chandra and his team recently reported that microbes have been the biggest sources of methane in the atmosphere, not the burning of fossil fuels.