(Washington) A brand new NASA mission has detected dozens of methane “super-emitters” from space, a performance scientists hope will help to limit emissions of this powerful greenhouse gas.
Posted at 6:45 p.m.
These “super-emitters” are generally sites linked to the fossil fuel, waste treatment or even agriculture sectors.
Launched into space in July and installed on the International Space Station, the mission, dubbed EMIT, was initially intended to observe how the movement of mineral dust affects the climate.
But this tool has also proven useful for another crucial task: it has observed more than 50 “super-emitters” in Central Asia, the Middle East and the southwestern United States, said NASA on Tuesday.
This capability “will not only help scientists better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also help understand how they can be tackled, and quickly,” said NASA boss Bill Nelson.
Some of the plumes detected “are among the largest ever seen,” Andrew Thorpe of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in a statement. “What we have found in such a short time is already beyond what we could imagine. »
In Turkmenistan, the instrument identified twelve plumes from oil and gas infrastructure east of the port city of Hazar. Blowing west, some of these plumes extend over 32 kilometers.
In the US state of New Mexico, another plume approximately 3.3 kilometers long has been detected at one of the largest oil fields in the world.
In Iran, south of Tehran, a plume of at least 4.8 kilometers was observed, coming from a waste treatment complex. Landfills can be a major source of methane, which then results from decomposition.
Scientists estimate that these three sites respectively release 50,400, 18,300 and 8,500 kilos of methane per hour.
EMIT is “the first of a new class of imaging spectrographs intended for observing the Earth”, pointed out NASA, although methods for satellite detection of methane leaks have already been greatly developed in recent years.
Methane is responsible for about 30% of global warming. Although it lasts much shorter in the atmosphere than CO2it has 80 times the warming power over a 20-year period.
A reduction in methane emissions is therefore crucial in order to meet the objectives of the Paris climate agreement.