Why Hong Kong buffalo burps may help unlock global methane mystery
A spike in the greenhouse gas has led an atmospheric scientist and a team of ‘gasbusters’ to Lantau Island to capture the breath of its feral bovines for analysis
THE HOT AFTERNOON sun is blazing down in Pui O, on Lantau Island, as the man and the woman move stealthily towards the grazing water buffalo.
Dressed in a maroon T-shirt and brown cap, the man, Jerry Morris, holds out a metal pole, about two metres long, towards the beast’s head. A slender rubber tube is fixed to the end of the pole nearest the buffalo and leads back to a clear plastic bag held by the red-headed woman, Rebecca Brownlow.
Hers is no ordinary plastic bag. It is leak-proof, and connected to a small pump she has slung over her shoulder. She turns on the pump, there is a low hum, and the bag begins to inflate. Perhaps irritated by the sound, the buffalo makes its move, ambling forward and leaving the two humans struggling for purchase in the mud.
“Hold it there – its breath is still in the air,” says Dr Euan Nisbet, who is watching intently, from a safe distance a few metres away. Bespectacled, blue shirted and with short-cropped grey hair beneath a red bush hat, Nisbet is a geologist turned atmospheric scientist and leader of a five-person team from Britain that is in Hong Kong to unravel the mysteries of methane’s role in climate change by catching buffalo breath in plastic bags.
If the scene strikes you as something that would have Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais reaching for their pens, consider this: several media outlets, including the Smithsonian magazine, have wrongly reported that Nisbet has suggested dinosaur farts caused global warming. While it could be argued they weren’t far off the mark, Nisbet is less than amused when I raise it with him (more of this later). And rightly so. His work is, after all, deadly serious.
The Lantau experiment, a joint project with the Swire Institute for Marine Science at the University of Hong Kong, is part of the painstaking detective work that is taking Nisbet and his team across the world – from the Arctic to Amazonia, and, of course, Hong Kong. And the results of their studies will have implications for the future of life as we know it.