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Changing boreal methane sources and constant biomass burning during the last termination

Abstract

Past atmospheric methane concentrations show strong fluctuations in parallel to rapid glacial climate changes in the Northern Hemisphere1,2 superimposed on a glacial–interglacial doubling of methane concentrations3,4,5. The processes driving the observed fluctuations remain uncertain but can be constrained using methane isotopic information from ice cores6,7. Here we present an ice core record of carbon isotopic ratios in methane over the entire last glacial–interglacial transition. Our data show that the carbon in atmospheric methane was isotopically much heavier in cold climate periods. With the help of a box model constrained by the present data and previously published results6,8, we are able to estimate the magnitude of past individual methane emission sources and the atmospheric lifetime of methane. We find that methane emissions due to biomass burning were about 45 Tg methane per year, and that these remained roughly constant throughout the glacial termination. The atmospheric lifetime of methane is reduced during cold climate periods. We also show that boreal wetlands are an important source of methane during warm events, but their methane emissions are essentially shut down during cold climate conditions.

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Figure 1: Typical carbon and hydrogen isotopic signatures of different CH 4 sources used in the Monte Carlo model.
Figure 2: Glacial/interglacial changes in methane and climate.
Figure 3: Methane box model results.

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Acknowledgements

This work is a contribution to EPICA, a joint European Science Foundation/European Commission scientific programme, funded by the EU and by national contributions from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The main logistical support was provided by IPEV and PNRA (at Dome C) and AWI (at Dronning Maud Land). This is EPICA publication no. 190. We thank I. Levin for providing reference air samples and for comments on the manuscript. We thank the logistics team (led by C. Drücker), the drilling team (led by F. Wilhelms) and all helpers in the field at EDML for making the science possible. Financial support for this study has been provided in part by the German Secretary of Education and Research program GEOTECHNOLOGIEN and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

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Correspondence to Hubertus Fischer.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

The file contains Supplementary Methods with additional references and Supplementary Tables S1-S2. The Supplementary Material provides details on the gas chromatography isotope ratio mass spectrometry (GC irmMS) method developed in this study to derive δ13CH4 in ice core samples. In addition details on the box model for the atmospheric methane cycle, the Monte Carlo approach and the sensitivity of the model of the choice on model parameters are given. The supplementary material includes supplementary table S1 (isotopic signature of sources and isotopic fractionation of sinks used in the model) and supplementary table S2 (Monte Carlo model estimates of source emissions and lifetime). (PDF 154 kb)

Supplementary Table

The file contains Supplementary Table S3 which includes δ13CH4 data from the EPICA Dronning Maud Land ice core over the last glacial/interglacial transition on the Greenland GICC05 age scale after methane synchronization as shown in Fig. 2. Given are δ13CH4 values after corrections for measurement offsets as well as δ13CH4 values after correction for gravitational enrichment in the firn column in ‰ relative to VPDB (see supplementary material for more details). (XLS 15 kb)

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Fischer, H., Behrens, M., Bock, M. et al. Changing boreal methane sources and constant biomass burning during the last termination. Nature 452, 864–867 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06825

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