Experts say that the unexplained explosions in the Nord Stream pipelines running from Russia to Europe could release an “unprecedented” amount of the greenhouse gas methane and be enormously damaging to the climate
. More than 100,000 metric tons of natural gas are bubbling on the surface of the Baltic Sea over a 1-kilometer area, leaking into both the water and the atmosphere. Around 90% of that is methane, a greenhouse gas with more than 80 times the global warming power of carbon dioxide . That’s comparable to the infamous Aliso Canyon leak in the United States in 2016, which released 97,000 tons of methane into the open air.
Paul Balcombe, a lecturer in chemical engineering at Imperial College London, told CNN that 200 kilotons of gas entering the atmosphere would equate to about 10% of the UK’s total methane emissions. Methane and CO2 are both greenhouse gases, but they behave in different ways. Balcombe told CNN that methane is a far greater risk to “near-term warming” than CO2. Although methane only lasts “around 10 years in the atmosphere,” its immediate impact is “much more potent.
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