Together, the plumes in Turkmenistan spew 50,400 kg of methane per hour.
An orbiting NASA instrument was mostly made to help scientists learn more about airborne dust and how it affects climate change. However, it has also been very good at doing another important Earth science job: finding large emissions of methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas.
Since it was put on the International Space Station in July, the imaging spectrometer has found more than 50 “super-emitters” of methane in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Southwestern United States, NASA said on Tuesday.
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Some of the new methane hotspots were already known, but others were just found. They include large oil and gas facilities and big landfills.
The spectrometer was made mainly to measure the wavelengths of light reflected from the surface soil in deserts and other dry places on Earth to find out what minerals were in the dust that was blown into the air.
NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Investigation, or EMIT, will help scientists figure out if dust in the air in different parts of the world is likely to trap or reflect heat from the sun, which could cause the planet to warm or cool.
Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles, where the instrument was designed and built, say that methane absorbs infrared light in a way that makes it easy for EMIT’s spectrometer to find.
EMIT can scan areas as large as dozens of miles across and as small as a soccer field from its perch on the space station, 250 miles (420 km) above Earth. It does this by going around the Earth every 90 minutes.
Andrew Thorpe, a research technologist at JPL who is in charge of the methane studies, said, “Some of the (methane) plumes EMIT found are among the biggest we’ve ever seen. They’re unlike anything we’ve ever seen from space. ”
Methane is a byproduct of decomposing organic matter and is the main component of natural gas used in power plants. It makes up a small part of all greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans, but it can trap 80 times more heat per pound than carbon dioxide.
Unlike CO2, which stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, methane stays for only about ten years. This means that cutting down on methane emissions warms the planet more quickly.
JPL showed off new images of methane super-emitters on Tuesday. One example was a group of 12 plumes coming from oil and gas infrastructure in Turkmenistan, some of which were more than 20 miles long (32 km).
Scientists think that the Turkmenistan plumes release a total of 111,000 pounds (50,400 kilogrammes) of methane per hour. This is about the same as the Aliso Canyon gas field blowout near Los Angeles in 2015, which was one of the largest accidental releases of methane in U.S. history.
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The other two big sources of methane were an oilfield in New Mexico and a waste-processing complex in Iran. Together, they released almost 60,000 pounds (29,000 kg) of methane per hour. Scientists didn’t know about either of them before, JPL officials said.
NASA says that EMIT, which is one of 25 Earth science instruments in space, could find hundreds of methane super-emitters before the end of its year-long mission.
