The three women battling a mysterious climate threat
Flying low over the Arctic, Dominika Pasternak is chasing a climate change mystery that poses a growing risk to the world.
(SOUNDBITE) (English) ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY PHD STUDENT - UNIVERSITY OF YORK, DOMINIKA PASTERNAK, SAYING:
"I think it's terrifying how much we are changing our planet and how little is really done to counteract it."
She's one of three student scientists exploring the air, land and water to solve a riddle - why there's so much methane in the earth's atmosphere.
(SOUNDBITE) (English) REUTERS CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT, MATTHEW GREEN, SAYING:
"Now, about ten years ago, scientists noticed that the level of methane in our atmosphere had started to rise very rapidly. Since then nobody's been able to figure out exactly why that might be the case. This flight is part of a bigger quest to solve the methane riddle and stop the global climate system from breaking down."
The greenhouse gas comes from a number of sources.
On board what is effectively a giant, airborne chemistry lab, the Polish PhD student is focusing on one of them - a cluster of oil rigs in the Norwegian Sea.
The plane passes back and forth at different altitudes, building a profile of the atmosphere downwind from the rigs while the researchers monitor the readings.
(SOUNDBITE) (English) ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY PHD STUDENT - UNIVERSITY OF YORK, DOMINIKA PASTERNAK, SAYING:
"Not many people paid attention to methane until quite recently ... and we don't know enough about it to be able to tell how dangerous it is, but we suspect it is very dangerous."
For Pasternak, its more than just a research trip.
The 23-year-old grew up on a hillside overlooking the Polish city of Krakow. Waking each morning to see a layer of pollution settled over the industrial metropolis, she vowed to protect the environment.
Back on the ground, ecologist Nina Lindstrom Friggens also traces her motivations to her childhood, in particular her love of Philip Pullman novels partly set in the frozen tundra of a fantasy world.
But the reality in this Arctic landscape could be grim.
Lindstrom Friggens is near Sweden's northern border piecing together the interplay between soil, ice and vegetation, to determine how quickly greenhouse gases will seep from these northern lands.
(SOUNDBITE) (English) ARCTIC ECOLOGIST - UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING, NINA LINDSTROM FRIGGENS, SAYING:
"The Arctic is extremely important because it is warming three times faster than the rest of the globe and there are huge carbon stores in the soils here in the arctic which have been building up over millennia and the fear is that with climate change those carbon stores are at a risk of being released into the atmosphere which will contribute to global warming everywhere on planet earth and contribute to rising temperatures and all the other negative effects of climate change globally."
One of the problems with methane is it is a much more potent greenhouse gas even than carbon dioxide. Put one way, if the warming affect of carbon dioxide is like putting a sheet around the planet, methane is like a wool blanket.
(SOUNDBITE) (English) EARTH SCIENCE STUDENT- UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE, KATHRYN BENNETT, SAYING:
"Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. It's 32x more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the planet. So we are seeing it emitted in a place like this and it contributes to what is called a positive feedback loop, so as more methane is being emitted, it causes more warming and more thawing which leads to even more methane which goes into the global atmosphere and so that contributes to warming all around the planet and not just in places like the Arctic."
Day after day, University of North Hampshire student Kathryn Bennett picks through this bogland in northern Sweden to collect gas samples.
As she's done so, she's also witnessed the landscape changing - walkways subsiding and the ground giving way as the underlying permafrost thaws.
That in turn releases methane - potentially triggering those feedback loops.
(SOUNDBITE) (English) REUTERS CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT, MATTHEW GREEN, SAYING:
We don't have a giant thermostat that we can use to control earth's atmosphere. Even if we cut fossil fuel use very rapidly, temperatures wont just bounce down back to the way we remember them.
As these three women try to unravel the methane enigma, this stark changes to the landscape show they are in a race against time.
