Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 06/14/2011 - 11:23
Forums
Microbial Activity in Thawing Arctic Permafrost

I am a student from St. Marks Catholic school in Florida. My question is what adverse effects are being caused due to the release of methane gas? How does it effect the atmospheric conditions on the earth?

Fri, 06/24/2011 - 14:08

Jim Miller

Hi, sorry it took me a few days to respond to your question; it took awhile to get settled up here in Barrow. Methane is a greenhouse gas, meaning that it has heat-trapping capabilities. The more Methane in the atmosphere, the more heat that will be trapped by Earth and not released back into space. The other bad part about methane is that once it is released into the atmosphere it will stay there for many, many years. So the affects of the methane released into the atmosphere today will affect our atmosphere for hundreds of years. Also, methane is much worse than carbon dioxide. If you have one unit of carbon dioxide and one unit of methane, the methane will hold 21 times more heat than the carbon dioxide. I hope that helps and if you have any further questions, feel free to post more!-Jim