New Zealand's 70 million sheep create 350 million methane gallons daily
If you could hook up a sheep to the carburetor of a car, you could run it for several kilometers a day. To power the same vehicle by people, you'd need a whole football team and a couple of kegs of beer. That observation is made by David Lowe, a geophysicist with the New Zealand Institute of Nuclear Sciences in Wellington. Scientists are studying the methane output because of its potential serious threat by contributing to global warming via the greenhouse effect. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, analysis of ancient air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice shows that 30,000 years ago methane concentration in the Earth's atmosphere was only a third as much as it is today. Radioactive dating can distinguish ages of different types of methane in the air, and researchers hope to quantify sources from sheep, swamps, people or industry. Sheep methane is collected at a local agricultural university from sheep with tubes protruding from their intestines. Sample collector Lowe alternates specimens from the university and the digester tank at the sewage treatment plant. The cleanest air samples, by contrast, are collected by Lowe at Baring Head, the first outcrop of land Antarctic winds hit after crossing thousands of miles of open sea. So far, Lowe and his colleagues have found that 75% of methane in the atmosphere is biological and of very recent origin. While the research goes on, New Zealand's sheep population continue to churn out 2.5 billion gallons of methane every week.
- OSTI ID:
- 5721208
- Journal Information:
- BioCycle; (USA), Vol. 28:6; ISSN 0276-5055
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
METHANE
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS
ANTARCTICA
ATMOSPHERES
ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY
GLOBAL ASPECTS
GREENHOUSE EFFECT
NEW ZEALAND
SHEEP
ALKANES
ANIMALS
ANTARCTIC REGIONS
AUSTRALASIA
CHEMISTRY
DOMESTIC ANIMALS
HYDROCARBONS
MAMMALS
ORGANIC COMPOUNDS
POLAR REGIONS
RUMINANTS
VERTEBRATES
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