Air from Greenland snow shows industrialization's impact on atmospheric methane

An international team of researchers, including scientists from Utrecht University and the University of Maryland, has reconstructed the concentration of clumped isotopes of methane in air from the past for the first time. This provides new insights into how atmospheric methane concentrations have changed since the start of the industrial era, around 1850. For the study, the scientists used air that was roughly 40 years old, preserved in compacted snow (firn) in Greenland. The results were published in Science Advances.