Methane emissions from tropical wetlands have been soaring since 2006 and accelerating at the same breakneck speed as when Earth's climate has flipped from a glacial to an interglacial period.
A dramatic spike in atmospheric methane over the past 16 years may be a sign that Earth's climate could flip within decades, scientists have warned.
"A termination is a major reorganization of the Earth's climate system," study lead author Euan Nisbet, a professor emeritus of Earth sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, told Live Science."These repeated changes have taken the world from ice ages into the sort of interglacial we have now."
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas released both by human activities — including fossil-fuel burning, landfills and agriculture — and natural processes, such as decomposition in wetlands. Human emissions soared in the 1980s with the expansion of the natural gas industry and stabilized in the 1990s, Nisbet said.
In the new study, published July 14 in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, Nisbet and colleagues compared current trends in atmospheric methane to the abrupt phase of warming during ice age terminations.
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