SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE - As the world shuttered in 2020 amid Covid-19 lockdowns, scientists expected to see one silver lining to the pandemic: a decrease in air pollution. With fewer cars on the roads and a drop in industrial activity, researchers did notice a dip in daily carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants. But methane, the second-largest contributor to climate change, surprisingly surged to its highest levels in the atmosphere since researchers began measuring it in the 1980s.
Six years later, a team of more than 40 scientists has offered an answer to this chemical mystery in a study published last week in Science, pointing to dynamics in the atmosphere and natural areas.
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“This paper really highlights the success of all these multitiered methods that we’ve developed as a community,” says Francesca Hopkins, a climate change scientist at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the work, to Fionna Samuels at Chemical and Engineering News. She adds that “the whole globe relies on these datasets.”