| Summary: | Atmospheric chemists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and elsewhere trekked to a remote and mosquito-infested stretch of Canadian bog, hoping to pry from it obscure information that may be critical to our understanding of climate warming. Computer models suggest that peatlands are especially sensitive to climate changes. As the globe heats up, they could thaw, releasing huge amounts of methane and related gases. Canada holds the second largest reserves of peat in the world, after Siberia. Since methane levels in the global atmosphere have increased erratically in recent years, sometimes by as much as one percent per year, tracing the origins and behavior of methane is particularly critical to understanding global warming.
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