For the past two decades, methane gas bubbles that are thought to be caused by the permafrost thaw have been popping up at certain times of the year on the Fairbanks, Alaska property. In addition to having fun stepping on the spongy surface, as shown in this video, golfers regularly poke the bubbles with tees and even light them on fire.
For golfers at North Star Golf Club in Fairbanks, Alaska, there’s an extra perk: if you come at the right time of year, you can find methane bubbles on the course. It’s been happening for the past two decades, according to Roger Evans, the club’s owner. People regularly poke them with tees and light them on fire, reported Alaska’s Energy Desk.
In many respects, the course at North Star Golf Club looks like any other, Alaska’s Energy Deskreported, with emerald grass dotted with ponds, idyllic forest on all sides, and a flock of bothersome geese. But it’s full of dips and swells, like a pond frozen in mid-ripple—and that’s not by design, Evans told Alaska’s Energy Desk.
“Twenty-five years ago, this was all a disked field that was all smooth,” he said. “So this is all permafrost action.”
Alaska’s Energy Desk’s report described a day when Evans was out on his golf course in big boots, squelching through the waterlogged grass to help scientist Katey Walter Anthony and her two assistants find some of the methane bubbles, Walter Anthony is a research professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who’s been studying methane bubbles in Alaska and Russia for almost 20 years.
Methane is produced beneath the turf, Walter Anthony told Alaska’s Energy Desk, when the permafrost thaw triggers the breakdown of organic matter that has accumulated beneath the soil over thousands of years.
“It’s like opening the freezer door, making it accessible to microbes that decompose it and turn it from organic carbon in the soil… back into greenhouse gases,” she described.
Often the greenhouse gas released is carbon dioxide. But when the decomposition happens in an environment without a lot of oxygen, it can produce methane too, Alaska’s Energy Desk reported.
The most obvious place for scientists to look for that kind of methane is in lakes and wetlands, because standing water makes it hard for oxygen to get into the soil. That’s where Walter Anthony usually does her research.
“To see and to hear about methane bubbles under grass in a golf course lawn is very different than the type of environment we’re normally sampling methane in,” she said.
North Star’s golf course is not exactly a wetland, but after four inches of rain in August, it is pretty soggy, reported Alaska’s Energy Desk. And Evans says the methane bubbles usually appear during the wet seasons: spring and fall.
Rainwater may be pooling above a layer of impermeable permafrost, Walter Anthony speculated, creating the conditions for methane production.
The bubbles can be as big as beach balls that bulge up out of the ground, Evans told Alaska’s Energy Desk. But even with flatter ones, tapping the ground with a foot quickly reveals that it’s not normal grass, as it wobbles like Jell-O. “It’s kind of like an air mattress,” Walter Anthony’s colleague Philip Hanke, a colleague of Walter Anthony, told Alaska’s Energy Desk.
“Or a waterbed,” Evans added.
What accounts for the bubbles? They probably occur, Walter Anthony told Alaska’s Energy Desk, when a layer of dense and fine silt under the grass and soil makes it hard for the methane to escape, All of the traffic that the golf course gets could be part of it, too, compressing the top layer to make it even denser.
Tell Us What You Think!
You must be logged in to post a comment.