With 50 years of experience working on Arctic ice and related areas Prof Peter Wadhams analyses the threat from the Arctic methane and goes into the methods that can be applied for methane removal

Methane is the most important and powerful short-lived greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. It is 23 times as powerful per molecule as carbon dioxide, but while CO2 has a residence time in the atmosphere of 100,000 years, methane released into the atmosphere is oxidized inside ten years. Why do we worry then? Because there’s a lot of it and the concentration is increasing fast. Already it is responsible for about 30% of global warming. It is produced by many sources, both natural and artificial, including agriculture (flooded rice paddies and digestive processes in domesticated animals), industry (leaks from gas pipelines, leaks from fracking processes) as well as thawing permafrost on land and under the sea.