A new NASA mission has detected dozens of methane ‘super-emitters’ from space, a performance scientists hope will act to limit emissions of this potent greenhouse gas. tight. These “super-emitters” are generally sites linked to the fossil fuel sectors (coal, oil or natural gas), waste treatment and agriculture.
Launched into space in July and installed on the International Space Station (ISS), the mission, called EMIT (for “Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation”), was primarily intended to observe how the movement of mineral dust affects the climate. But this tool has made it possible to observe more than fifty “super-emitters” in Central Asia, the Middle East and the southwestern United States, NASA announcedTuesday, October 25.
This ability “will not only help scientists better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also help understand how they can be tackled, and quickly”said NASA boss Bill Nelson. Some of the plumes detected “are among the greatest ever seen”said Andrew Thorpe of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in a statement. “What we have found in such a short time is already beyond what we could imagine. »
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Plumes more than 32 kilometers long
In Turkmenistan, the instrument identified twelve plumes from oil and gas infrastructure east of the port city of Hazar. Some of these plumes extend over 32 kilometers. In the US state of New Mexico, another plume about 3.3 kilometers long was detected at one of the largest oil fields in the world. In Iran, south of Tehran, a plume of at least 4.8 kilometers was observed, coming from a waste treatment complex. Scientists estimate that these three sites respectively release 50,400, 18,300 and 8,500 kilos of methane per hour.
The EMIT mission is “the first of a new class of imaging spectrographs intended to observe the Earth”, pointed out NASA, although satellite detection methods for methane leaks have already developed greatly in recent years. Methane is responsible for about 30% of global warming. Although it remains in the atmosphere for a much shorter time than CO₂, it has eighty times the warming power over a twenty-year period.