[acottawa]

Originally Posted by roger1818

From the article:



The thing I don't get is if the organic material is flowing into the reservoir from somewhere upstream, wouldn't it have flowed further down the river anyway and decomposed elsewhere and produced the same amount of methane? In that case, the dam isn't creating new methane, is is just changing where it is being released.

If they are talking about organic matter that was above water before the dam was built and is now underwater in the reservoir, that is a different story, but even then,

1. There is a finite amount that will eventually be depleted,
2. They could clear the organic material from the area that will be flooded for the reservoir, and deal with it more effectively.

I'm not a scientist and stand to be corrected, but I would imagine one difference is that a reservoir wouldn't have a full ecosystem' so organic material that might have ended up in the ocean and the food chain instead gets trapped behind a dam and decomposes (producing methane).