Earth/Environment

A killer methane belch, radon-siphoning trees, deep oil-spill science and more in this week’s news

Killer carbon burp
A big belch of carbon may be to blame for the mass extinction that swept the planet around 200 million years ago. A new study of wax from fossilized plants of the time suggests that 12 trillion tons of methane gas entered the atmosphere over just a few tens of thousands of years.