Ice and Fire: The role of methane in the climate story

By a biogeochemist who studied the molecule

What I studied

Two years ago, I partook in a scientific conference of early career arctic climate scientists and paleolimnologists (the study of lake records to illuminate past environmental conditions). The ice breaker (no pun intended) consisted of us writing a 200-or-fewer synopsis on our work, using only the 1,000 most common English words (see: https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/). The idea of using this editor is that the simpler the words we use to describe our work, the easier it would be to understand. Here was my entry:

In a world where the sun burns hotter and the waves and winds start to die, our world begins to lose a lot of very old ice that was locked far far away in the high north circles of the Earth. As this ice becomes water, it puts into the air lots of little things called “air fire” which force the world to be even hotter than it already was. With no countering forces, the Earth starts to run away with green houses…

It is up to me to save the world. What I do to fix the running away of green houses is to study how little water grasses within water bodies can add or remove this “air fire.” If we can understand how this works, then we can try to stop our Earth from warming up too…