Half of global methane emissions come from aquatic ecosystems – much of this is human-made

Judith Rosentreter, Yale University; Alberto Borges, Université de Liège; Ben Poulter, NASA, and Bradley Eyre, Southern Cross UniversityMethane — a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide — plays a major role in controlling the Earth’s climate. But methane concentrations in the atmosphere today are 150% higher than before the industrial revolution.

In our paper published today in Nature Geoscience, we show as much as half of global methane emissions come from aquatic ecosystems. This includes natural, human-created and human-impacted aquatic ecosystems — from flooded rice paddies and aquaculture ponds to wetlands, lakes and salt marshes.

Our findings are significant. Scientists had previously underestimated this global methane contribution due to underaccounting human-created and human-impacted aquatic ecosystems.

It’s critical we use this new information to stop rising methane concentrations derailing our attempts to stabilise the Earth’s temperature.

From underwater sediment to the atmosphere

Most of the methane emitted from aquatic ecosystems is produced by micro-organisms living in deep, oxygen-free sediments. These tiny organisms break down organic matter such as dead algae in a process called “methanogenesis”.

Flooded rice paddies — Rice farming releases more methane per year than the entire open ocean.
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This releases methane to the water, where some is consumed by other types of micro-organisms. Some of it also reaches the atmosphere.

Natural systems have always released methane (known as “background” methane). And freshwater ecosystems, such as lakes and wetlands, naturally release more methane than coastal and ocean environments.

Human-made or human-impacted aquatic ecosystems, on the other hand, increase the amount of organic matter available to produce methane, which causes emissions to rise.

Significant global contribution

Between 2000 and 2006, global methane emissions stabilised, and scientists are still unsure why. Emissions began steadily rising again in 2007.

There’s active debate in the scientific community about how much of the renewed increase is caused by emissions or by a decline of “methane sinks” (when methane is eliminated, such as from bacteria in soil, or from chemical reactions in the atmosphere).

We looked at inland, coastal and oceanic ecosystems around the world. While we cannot resolve the debate about what causes the renewed increase of atmospheric methane, we found the combined emissions of natural, impacted and human-made aquatic ecosystems are highly variable, but may contribute 41% to 53% of total methane emissions globally.

In fact, these combined emissions are a larger source of methane than direct anthropogenic methane sources, such as cows, landfill and waste, and coal mining. This knowledge is important because it can help inform new monitoring and measurements to distinguish where and how methane emissions are produced.

Water is a big part of much of our landscape, from mountain rivers to the coastal ocean. This aerial image shows Himalaya rivers, wetlands, lakes and ponds, and the world’s largest mangrove forest (the Sundarbans) at the coast of the tropical Bay of Bengal.
George Allen, Author provided

The alarming human impact

There is an increasing pressure from humans on aquatic ecosystems. This includes increased nutrients (like fertilisers) getting dumped into rivers and lakes, and farm dam building as the climate dries in many places.

In general, we found methane emissions from impacted, polluted and human-made aquatic ecosystems are higher than from more natural sites.

For example, fertiliser runoff from agriculture creates nutrient-rich lakes and reservoirs, which releases more methane than nutrient-poor (oligotrophic) lakes and reservoirs. Similarly, rivers polluted with nutrients also have increased methane emissions.

An aquaculture farm — Coastal aquaculture farms emit up to 430 times more methane per area than coastal habitats.
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What’s particularly alarming is the strong methane release from rice cultivation, reservoirs and aquaculture farms.

Globally, rice cultivation releases more methane per year than all coastal wetlands, the continental shelf and open ocean together.

The fluxes in methane emissions per area of coastal aquaculture farms are 7-430 times higher than from coastal habitats such as mangrove forests, salt marshes or seagrasses. And highly disturbed mangroves and salt marsh sites have significantly higher methane fluxes than more natural sites.

So how do we reduce methane emissions?

For aquatic ecosystems, we can effectively reduce methane emissions and help mitigate climate change with the right land use and management choices.

For example, managing aquaculture farms and rice paddies so they alternate between wet and dry conditions can reduce methane emissions.

Restoring salt marsh and mangrove habitats and the flow of seawater from tides is another promising strategy to further reduce methane emissions from degraded coastal wetlands.

We should also reduce the amount of nutrients coming from fertilisers washing into freshwater wetlands, lakes, reservoirs and rivers as it leads to organic matter production, such as toxic algal blooms. This will help curtail methane emissions from inland waters.

These actions will be most effective if we apply them in the aquatic ecosystems that have the greatest contribution of aquatic methane: freshwater wetlands, lakes, reservoirs, rice paddies and aquaculture farms.

This will be no small effort, and will require knowledge across many disciplines. But with the right choices we can create conditions that bring methane fluxes down while also preserving ecosystems and biodiversity.

Judith Rosentreter, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Yale University; Alberto Borges, Research Director FRS-FNRS, Associate Professor at ULiège, Université de Liège; Ben Poulter, Research scientist, NASA, and Bradley Eyre, Professor of Biogeochemistry, Director of the Centre for Coastal Biogeochemistry, Southern Cross University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We tested tiger snake scales to measure wetland pollution in Perth. The news is worse than expected

Damian Lettoof, Curtin University; Kai Rankenburg, Curtin University; Monique Gagnon, Curtin University, and Noreen Evans, Curtin University

Australia’s wetlands are home to a huge range of stunning flora and fauna, with large snakes often at the top of the food chain.

Many wetlands are located near urban areas. This makes them particularly susceptible to contamination as stormwater, urban drainage and groundwater can wash metals — such as arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury — into the delicate ecosystem.

We know many metals can travel up the food chain when they’re present in the environment. So to assess contamination levels, we caught highly venomous tiger snakes across wetlands in Perth, and repurposed laser technology to measure the metals they accumulated.

In our new paper, we show metal contamination in wild wetland tiger snakes is chronic, and highest in human-disturbed wetlands. This suggests all other plants and animals in these wetlands are likely contaminated as well.

34 times more arsenic in wild wetland snakes than captive snakes

Urban growth and landscape modification often introduces metals into the surrounding environment, such as mining, landfill and waste dumps, vehicles and roadworks, and agriculture.

When they reach wetlands, sediments collect and store these metals for hundreds of years. And if a wetland’s natural water levels are lowered, from agricultural draining for example, sediments can become exposed and erode. This releases the metals they’ve been storing into the ecosystem.

A reflective lake, with green vegetation surrounding it — The wetland in Yanchep National Park, Perth, was supposed to be our ‘clean’ comparison site. Its levels of metal contamination was unprecedented.
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This is what we suspect happened in Yanchep National Park’s wetland, which was supposed to be our “clean” comparison site to more urban wetlands. But in a 2020 study looking at sediment contamination, we found this wetland had higher levels of selenium, mercury, chromium and cadmium compared to urban wetlands we tested.

And at Herdsman Lake, our most urban wetland five minutes from the Perth city centre, we found concentrations of arsenic, lead, copper and zinc in sediment up to four times higher than government guidelines.

In our new study on tiger snake scales, we compared the metal concentrations in wild wetland tiger snakes to the concentrations that naturally occurs in captive-bred tiger snakes, and to the sediment in the previous study.

We found arsenic was 20-34 times higher in wild snakes from Herdsman Lake and Yanchep National Park’s wetland. And snakes from Herdsman Lake had, on average, eight times the amount of uranium in their scales compared to their captive-bred counterparts.

Tiger snake on the ground, near rubbish. — Our research confirmed snake scales are a good indicator of environmental contamination.
Damian Lettoof, Author provided

Tiger snakes usually prey on frogs, so our results suggest frogs at these lakes are equally as contaminated.

We know for many organisms, exposure to a high concentration of metals is fatally toxic. And when contamination is chronic, it can be “neurotoxic”. This can, for example, change an organism’s behaviour so they eat less, or don’t want to breed. It can also interfere with their normal cellular function, compromising immune systems, DNA repair or reproductive processes, to name a few.

Snakes in general appear relatively resistant to the toxic effects of metal contamination, but we’re currently investigating what these levels of contamination are doing to tiger snakes’ health and well-being.

Our method keeps snakes alive

Snakes can be a great indicator of environmental contamination because they generally live for a long time (over 10 years) and don’t travel too far from home. So by measuring metals in older snakes, we can assess the contamination history of the area they were collected from.

Typically, scientists use liver tissue to measure biological contamination since it acts like a filter and retains a substantial amount of the contaminants an animal is exposed to.

But a big problem with testing the liver is the animal usually has to be sacrificed. This is often not possible when studying threatened species, monitoring populations or working with top predators.

Two black swans in a lake, near cut grass — Sediment in Herdsman Lake had four times higher heavy metal levels than what government guidelines allow.
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In more recent years, studies have taken to measuring metals in external “keratin” tissues instead, which include bird feathers, mammal hair and nails, and reptile scales. As it grows, keratin can accumulate metals from inside the body, and scientists can measure this without needing to kill the animal.

Our research used “laser ablation” analysis, which involves firing a focused laser beam at a solid sample to create a small crater or trench. Material is excavated from the crater and sent to a mass spectrometer (analytical machine) where all the elements are measured.

This technology was originally designed for geologists to analyse rocks, but we’re among the first researchers applying it to snake scales.

Laser ablation atomises the keratin of snake scales, and allowed us to accurately measure 19 contaminants from each tiger snake caught over three years around different wetlands.

Wild tiger snake — Snakes generally appear resistant to the toxic effects of heavy metals.
Kristian Bell/Shutterstock

We need to minimise pollution

Our research has confirmed snake scales are a good indicator of environmental contamination, but this is only the first step.

Further research could allow us to better use laser ablation as a cost-effective technology to measure a larger suite of metals in different parts of the ecosystem, such as in different animals at varying levels in the food chain.

This could map how metals move throughout the ecosystem and help determine whether the health of snakes (and other top predators) is actually at risk by these metal levels, or if they just passively record the metal concentrations in their environment.

It’s difficult to prevent contaminants from washing into urban wetlands, but there are a number of things that can help minimise pollution.

This includes industries developing strict spill management requirements, and local and state governments deploying storm-water filters to catch urban waste. Likewise, thick vegetation buffer zones around the wetlands can filter incoming water.

Damian Lettoof, PhD Candidate, Curtin University; Kai Rankenburg, Researcher, Curtin University; Monique Gagnon, Researcher, Curtin University, and Noreen Evans, Professor, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.