A study estimated that the extinction of Ice Age megafauna removed just under 10 teragrams (about 10 million tons) of methane emissions a year, accounting for between 12.5% and possibly 100% of the methane reduction at the start of the Younger Dryas.
Sources
- Mammoth-Belch Deficit Caused Prehistoric Cooling? (nationalgeographic.com)
- https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo877 (nature.com)
- https://insider.si.edu/2010/06/killing-of-methane-producing-megafauna-may-have-caused-cooling-13000-years-ago (insider.si.edu)
- https://news.unm.edu/news/390 (news.unm.edu)
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248828311_Methane_emissions_from_extinct_megafauna (researchgate.net)
- https://smithpaleo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Methane-emissions.pdf (smithpaleo.org)
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