Treethane: A New Frontier in the Global Carbon Cycle?

How Methane-eating Bacteria Could Be A Game Changer For Curbing Greenhouse Gases

Trees are the Earth’s lungs – it’s well understood they drawdown and lock up vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But emerging research is showing trees can also emit methane, and it’s currently unknown just how much.

This could be a major problem, given methane is a greenhouse gas about 45 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming our planet.

However, in a world-first discovery published in Nature Communications, we found unique methane-eating communities of bacteria living within the bark of a common Australian tree species: paperbark (Melaleuca quinquenervia). These microbial communities were abundant, thriving, and mitigated about one third of the substantial methane emissions from paperbark that would have otherwise ended up in the atmosphere.

Because research on tree methane (“treethane”) is still in its relative infancy, there are many questions that need to be resolved. Our discovery helps fill these critical gaps, and will change the way we view the role of trees within the global methane cycle.

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