A study estimated that the extinction of Ice Age megafauna removed just under 10 teragrams (about 10 million tons) of methane emissions, accounting for at least 12–15% (and possibly up to 100%) of the methane reduction at the start of the Younger Dryas.
Notes on verification
Confirmed by the peer-reviewed 2010 Nature Geoscience study (Smith et al.) and corroborated independently by Smithsonian Institution and University of New Mexico press materials. Minor rounding discrepancy (12% vs 12.5%) is negligible. [tier=gold indep_score=0.92 clusters=5 claim_tier=notable]
Sources
- Mammoth-Belch Deficit Caused Prehistoric Cooling? (seed:history_and_archaeology)
- https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo877 (corroboration)
- https://insider.si.edu/2010/06/killing-of-methane-producing-megafauna-may-have-caused-cooling-13000-years-ago (corroboration)
- https://news.unm.edu/news/390 (corroboration)
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248828311_Methane_emissions_from_extinct_megafauna (corroboration)
- https://smithpaleo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Methane-emissions.pdf (corroboration)