These “super-emotional” are generally sites related to the sectors of fossil fuels, waste treatment and agriculture. Methane is responsible for around 30 % of global warming.
Le Monde with AFP
A new NASA mission has made it possible to detect dozens of methane “super-emotionals” from the space, a performance which scientists hope to act in order to limit the emissions of this powerful gas Greenhouse effect. These “super-emotional” are generally sites related to the sectors of fossil fuels (coal, oil or natural gas), treatment of waste and agriculture.
Launched in space in July and installed on the International Space Station (ISS), the mission, called Emit (for “Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation”, ie “Survey on the sources of mineral dust on the surface of the earth” “), was first intended to observe the way in which the movement of mineral dust affects the climate. But this tool made it possible to observe more than fifty “super-emotional” in Central Asia, the Middle East and in the southwest of the United States, announced NASA , Tuesday October 25.
This ability “will not only help scientists better locate hence methane leaks come, but also help understand how we can attack it, and quickly,” said the boss of NASA, Bill Bill Nelson. Some of the plumes detected “are among the largest ever seen,” Andrew Thorpe, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a statement. “What we found in such a short time already goes beyond what we could imagine.”
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plumes over 32 kilometers long
In Turkmenistan, the instrument identified twelve plumes from a gas and oil infrastructure east of the port city of Hazar. Some of these plumes extend over 32 kilometers. In the American state of New Mexico, another plume of approximately 3.3 kilometers long was detected at the level of one of the largest oil fields in the world. In Iran, south of Tehran, a plume of at least 4.8 kilometers was observed, from a waste treatment complex. Scientists estimate that these three sites relax 50,400, 18,300 and 8,500 kilos of methane per hour respectively.
The Emit mission is “the first of a new class of imaging spectrographs intended to observe the earth,” said NASA, although satellite detection methods of methane leaks have already developed in recent years . Methane is responsible for around 30 % of the global warming. Even if it remains much shorter in the atmosphere than the CO₂, it has a power of warming eighty times higher over a period of twenty years.