Receding glaciers in the Arctic are exposing groundwater resources that contain very high concentrations of methane, which can release significant amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
“This is a new path for methane emissions that we hadn’t identified before,” says Gabriel Kleber at the University of Cambridge.
Hundreds of springs have sprung up at the foot of retreating glaciers in Norway’s Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen. Kleber was intrigued by the springs, in part because of their “sulphurous, egg-scented”. Although methane is odorless, in high methane conditions, microbes sometimes produce gases such as hydrogen sulfide that have this distinctive odor. “We know …