The largest cloud of methane gas in the atmosphere above the United States is sitting above the Four Corners region of the Southwest. It’s been there for several years and scientists have been aware of it since at least 2003. SCIAMACHY’s data from 2002 through 2012 consistently tracked the methane mass hovering above the southwest during that time, but it was concluded that SCIAMACHY’s (European Space Agency’s Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography) data was “…so extreme scientists still waited several more years before investigating the region in detail,” according to the Christian Science Monitor.
“We didn’t focus on it because we weren’t sure if it was a true signal or an instrument error,” said Christian Frankenberg from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a statement.
Since NASA is far more focused on things like the slim possibility of finding life on Mars than dealing with the abundant bovine sized threats to life as we all know it on planet Earth, it is not shocking that it took their scientists 10 years to bother checking the data for error about a cloud of methane too extreme to investigate. But it is surprising that scientists outside NASA lacked the curiosity to check out a known 2500 square mile area (about the size of Delaware) of methane gas hovering above the Southwest. Perhaps the National Ski Areas Association should begin promoting Scientists Ski Weeks at western ski areas to help introduce the scientific community to the joys of skiing and the environmental and spiritual pleasures of mountains buried under snow rather than drying out beneath mysterious masses of methane. NASA scientists appear to be more familiar with interpreting data indicating that the dry winds of Olympus Mons blow 350 mph than with dry powder snow in the face coming out of a turn in the back bowls of Vail after a classic (remember the classics?) Rocky Mountain dump. NSAA has a potential market in NASA and NASA might find a perspective not too extreme to investigate in NSAA. More mysterious things have happened.
Frankenberg co-authored a study published last year in Geophysical Research Letters that concluded the mass over the Southwest contained atmospheric methane concentrations equivalent to about 1.3 million pounds of emissions a year, about 80% higher than previous EDA estimates. There is less methane in the earth’s atmosphere than CO2, but methane traps significantly more heat in the atmosphere than CO2. That is, methane is known to be a significant (perhaps the major?) contributor to human caused global warming and climate change.
A CBS news report last year was titled “Scientists Puzzled By Methane Mystery Over Four Corners.” The Christian Science Monitor story about the same matter carried the title “How scientists overlooked a 2500 square-mile cloud of methane over the Southwest.” In that article Terry Engelder, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University in state College, noted that it can be hard to determine how responsible industry is for methane emissions in certain areas and is quoted as saying “….we really don’t know to (sic) the extent to which the coal industry and coalbed methane increased and aggravated an existing, natural condition.”
Science is a difficult and exacting endeavor and finding mysterious clouds of methane, much less determining where they came from, cannot be a simple task. But it seems to me that whether one is a scientist with NASA or a professor of one of the sciences at a prestigious university a good place to begin any investigation is with the obvious. For instance, in the case of the mysterious mass of methane over the Four Corners it is worth noting and very obvious to the folks living there that the states surrounding that area—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, California, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho and Texas—are home to some 33,000,000 cattle. Any scientist worth a cow fart could easily determine that a cow contributes approximately 220 pounds (POUNDS!) of methane to the atmosphere every year. Each cow’s yearly methane donation to the atmosphere’s rising temperature is the equivalent of an automobile’s CO2 gift to global warming after being driven 7800 miles. Even a non-scientist with a calculator can determine that every year the cattle of those eight southwestern states donate 7,260,000,000 pounds (POUNDS!!!!) of methane to the atmosphere above those states. Every year. 7,260,000,000 pounds every year. Year after year after year after year after…………
That’s a lot of methane and the fact that it is a mystery to NASA scientists how a cloud of it the size of Delaware formed above an area with 33,000,000 methane factories gives an added dimension to the old saw, “It’s not exactly rocket science.”