Ice-core team reports a methane spike that models had parked in the next decade
A Greenland core shows a sharp rise in methane around a period researchers thought would stay quiet, forcing a rewrite of a chapter that was going to press.
The paper, accepted overnight by a letters journal, is careful. It does not claim a new mechanism. It claims the timing is earlier than the last round of models used for a regional forecast.
Co-author Benoit Clerc said the lab ran the measurements twice, on two instruments, because nobody in the group wanted to be first with an awkward number.
Climate offices said they would fold the result into the next update, not a panic revision. Still, one modeller admitted: “We had that decade in a drawer marked later.”
