Around 15 per cent of today’s global warming is down to methane, but where does all this gas come from? Some at least could be bubbling up from an unlikely source – deep-sea volcanoes.
Until now, such volcanoes were thought to be a negligible source of atmospheric methane because everyone assumed the gas would oxidise long before it reached the surface. However, research on HÃ¥kon Mosby, a mud volcano 1250 metres down in the Norwegian Sea, has overturned this assumption.
Eberhard Sauter of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, and his colleagues found a…
