Methane seekers: Radio reporter Melissa Block, UAF scientist
Katey Walter, and NPR producer Art Silverman
Photo: River Gates of Anchorage
It bubbled. It boiled. It stank.
University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist Katey Walter just wanted to show a National Public Radio news crew a smidgin of methane seeping from a lake on Alaska’s North Slope near Barrow. It’s all part of her investigations into the supergreenhouse gas, and how it oozes into the atmosphere all over the Far North.
Bacteria that digest dead vegetation and other edible gunk on the lake bottom produce methane that gets trapped in the muck, sometimes for eons. When lake-bottom permafrost melts in late summer, this flammable gas bubbles up into the air.
A potentially huge problem in the event of widespread meltdown of the Far North’s “permanently frozen” earth, this methane venting occurs on a small scale wherever vegetation rots.
But Walter and the journalists came upon a churning, bubbling spot in the middle of the lake located on the vast brown tundra near Barrow.
“When they reached their destination,” wrote UAF writer Sandra Boatwright in an online story, “Walter and the crew found even more than they bargained for — A lake violently boiling with escaping methane.”