Methane chasers: Hunting a climate-changing gas seeping from Earth’s seafloor

Methane chasers: Hunting a climate-changing gas seeping from Earth’s seafloor

They’ve been called “bubble chasers,” and “seep seekers,” though they sometimes call themselves “flare hunters.” They’re a small group of scientific specialists searching the world’s oceans for tiny streams of methane gas-filled globules rising from seafloor sediments. On expeditions ranging from the Arctic to Antarctica, carried out in shallow waters to thousands of meters below the sea’s surface, their studies reveal how these tiny globules ca…