Methane is a gas often associated with swamps in the southeast or West Texas oil deposits. But last year scientists found the largest concentration in the US hanging quietly above in an unexpected place. Now, researchers are gearing up to get to the bottom of the
Four Corners plume:
“With all the ground-based and airborne resources that the different groups are bringing to the region, we have the unique chance to unequivocally solve the Four Corners mystery,” Christian Frankenberg, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said, in a statement.
As part of the experiment, scientists will fly two Twin Otter aircraft over the Four Corners area, where the borders of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah meet. These planes will carry two instruments -- the Next-Generation Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRISng), which can be used to map methane in great detail in the entire region, and the Hyperspectral Thermal Emission Spectrometer (HyTES), which can carry out highly sensitive measurements.
Methane is a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon-dioxide. There's enough of it above the area to equal the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from three million averaged sized cars. And yet, just ten or twenty years ago there was no indication of a large plume in the region.
It's certainly possible it went unnoticed until now. But a lot has changed in the last two decades. The middle and high western desert is now home to one of the larger coal mining operations in the world and a number of natural gas fracking sites have come online all around the area as well. If methane is leaking en mass from those kinds of places, it could mean a new, unwelcome factor contributing to climate change.