Editor's Summary
12 January 2006
Natural natural gas plants
The unexpectedly high levels of the green-house gas methane over tropical forests, and the recent decline in the atmospheric growth rate of methane concentrations, cannot be readily explained with the accepted global methane budget. Now a genuinely surprising discovery provides a possible explanation for these phenomena, and may have implications for modelling past and future climates. It was thought that methane formed naturally only in anaerobic conditions, in marshes for instance. In fact living plants, as well as plant litter, emit methane to the atmosphere under oxic conditions. This additional source of methane could account for 10–30% of the annual methane source strength and has been overlooked in previous studies
News and Views: Global change: A green source of surprise
Living terrestrial vegetation emits large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. This unexpected finding, if confirmed, will have an impact on both greenhouse-gas accounting and research into sources of methane.
David C. Lowe
doi:10.1038/439148a
Letter: Methane emissions from terrestrial plants under aerobic conditions
Frank Keppler,
John T. G. Hamilton,
Marc Bra
and
Thomas Röckmann
doi:10.1038/nature04420
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