Climate scientists are worried about methane gas emitted by wetlands as an influence on our warming climate. Wetlands are lands that are saturated with water permanently or seasonally, such as swamps or peatlands. They are home to many different kinds of plants, animals, and microorganisms.
Earth’s climate is warming because of human activities such as burning fossil fuels. The warming is due to heat trapping greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, which are accumulating in the atmosphere. Methane has eighty times the heat trapping power of carbon dioxide. Human activities that produce methane include agriculture and the production and use of fossil fuels.
Researchers want to predict what will happen to the climate as the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rises. They are especially worried about positive feedback loops. These are vicious circles in which warming causes changes that, in turn, produce still more warming. In 2025, an international team of scientists announced worrisome results from a study indicating that as the Earth’s climate gets warmer, wetlands will emit more methane.
The scientists heated an area of wetlands using special lamps and underground cables to simulate a warmer climate. They found that methane emissions from the heated area increased. The increase was caused by a change in the balance between strains of microbes that produce methane and other strains of microbes that remove it. Both kinds were more active in warmer soil, but the methane producing microbes overwhelmed the methane consuming ones. The scientists warned that their results indicate that wetlands will produce much more methane in a warmer world and this could further exacerbate the problem of global climate change.
A special thanks goes to Fabiola Murguia-Flores, Institute for the Investigation of Ecosystems and Sustainability, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Morelia, Mexico and Joseph Holden, School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK, for reviewing today's episode.
Further Reading
- Wetland bacteria could make more methane in a warming world
- Hotter temps trigger wetlands to emit more methane as microbes struggle to keep up | EurekAlert!
- Wetlands are a hidden source of rising methane emissions - Earth.com
- Global Warming Could Cause Wetlands to Emit More Methane, Study Finds - EcoWatch
- Methane | Vital Signs – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet
J. Lee et al. 2025 Climate-induced shifts in sulfate dynamics regulate anaerobic methane oxidation in a coastal wetland, Science Advances, 11(18): eads6093. Doi: 10.1126/sciadv.ads6093.