Researchers find unexpectedly large methane source in overlooked landscape
Haley Dunleavy
907-474-6407
Aug. 7, 2024

When Katey Walter Anthony heard rumors of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, ballooning under the lawns of fellow Fairbanks residents, she nearly didn’t believe it.

“I ignored it for years because I thought ‘I am a limnologist, methane is in lakes,’” she said.

But when a local reporter contacted Walter Anthony, who is a research professor at the Institute of Northern Engineering at University of Alaska Fairbanks, to inspect the waterbed-like ground at a nearby golf course, she started to pay attention. Like others in Fairbanks, they lit “turf bubbles” on fire and confirmed the presence of methane gas.

Then, when Walter Anthony looked at nearby sites, she was shocked that methane wasn’t just coming out of a grassland. “I went through the forest, the birch trees and the spruce trees, and there was methane gas coming out of the ground in large, strong streams,” she said.

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