The Arctic sea floor was once like a pressure cooker, with methane gas building, building, building beneath an ice sheet for thousands of years. But when the ice eventually melted, the lid suddenly burst off, unleashing enormous amounts of methane and forming deep craters.
Some 12,000 years later, the craters are still profusely leaking methane — a potent greenhouse gas and a major contributor to global warming. While scientists have known about pockmarks since the 1990s, a new study shows the craters cover a much larger area than previously thought.
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