A NASA orbiter spotted Central Asia, the Middle East, and the southwestern United States. More than 50 plants and equipment that are major pollutants due to the emission of methane gas into the atmosphere. This compound is one of the biggest contributors to global warming.
The Investigation of Mineral Dust Resources on the Earth’s Surface (EMIT for English abbreviation) instrument was installed on the International Space Station in July and made its observations from there.
“Control of methane emissions is key to limiting global warming”NASA Director Bill Nelson said in a statement.
The agency announced that EMIT has developed a map of the mineral distribution in the planet’s deserts and released dust into the atmosphere to deepen our understanding of the impact of airborne dust on Earth’s climate.
The methane absorbs infrared light in a unique pattern known as a “spectral fingerprint,” which EMIT’s imaging spectrometer can distinguish with great precision. Similarly, it can measure the presence of carbon dioxide.
Methane emissions into the atmosphere today are only a small amount compared to carbon dioxide and contribute less to global warming than CO2, but scientists estimate that methane warms the atmosphere 80 times more than CO2 within 20 years of emissionthen to deploy the activity.
Andrew Thorpe, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said that some of the methane clouds identified by EMIT are “among the largest clouds ever seen, incomparable to anything seen from space.”
in the USA, Asia and the Middle East
EMIT detected A cloud about 3.3 kilometers southeast of Carlsbad in the Permian Basin (USA)one of the world’s largest oil fields, stretching into parts of southeastern New Mexico and western Texas.
In Turkmenistan, EMIT detects twelve clouds originating from oil and gas infrastructures The port city on the shores of the Caspian Sea is in the east of the Caspian. Some of the clouds, carried to the west by the wind, stretch for more than 32 kilometers.
According to Nelson, This instrument has proven to be “an important tool for measuring this gas”. “This contributes to the greenhouse effect and controls it at its source,” he said.