The 700-meter wide pool of bubbling water in the Baltic Sea caused by the rupture of the Nord Stream gas pipelines points to a climate disaster. It’s the most visible of three major gas leaks emanating from the pipelines connecting Russia to Germany. Scientists are scrambling to work out just how much methane, one of the most powerful greenhouse gases, has escaped into the atmosphere. The fear is that it could be one of the worst releases ever. The cause of the three near-simultaneous pipeline ruptures hasn’t been confirmed, but German and US officials said the incident looked like sabotage. While the Nord Stream 1 pipelines were halted — and Nordstream 2 had never even started — they all contained pressurized natural gas, the vast majority of which is methane. “Given that, over twenty years, a ton of methane has a climate impact more than 80 times that of […]