Nature - Warming Speeds Up Methane Releases From Freshwater Habitats
Methane or natural gas is a greenhouse gas. Weight for weight, it is more than 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a century, and researchers have repeatedly examined the contribution of natural gas emitted by ruminant cattle to global warming. But Gabriel Yvon-Durocher of the University of Exeter and colleagues considered something wider: the pattern of response to temperature in those natural ecosystems that are home to microbes that release methane.
They report in Nature that they looked at data from hundreds of field surveys and laboratory experiments to explore the speed at which the flow of methane increased with temperature.
Microbes, algae, freshwater plants and animals are all part of an active ecosystem and take their nourishment from and return waste to the atmosphere. Healthy plants take CO2 from the atmosphere with photosynthesis. Most of the methane in freshwater systems is produced by an important group of microbes called Archaea that live in waterlogged, oxygen-free sediments and play an important role in decay.
Plant uptake of CO2 is affected by temperature, and so is microbial methane production. Respiration also releases CO2. The questions the researchers set out to answer were: which gas is more likely to be released in greater quantities as temperatures rise? And is the outcome the same whether they examine the Archaea only, or all the microbes in an ecosystem, or the entire package of submerged freshwater life?
EDIT
http://ecowatch.com/2014/03/20/global-warming-speeds-methane-emissions/
