Airborne Mapping Reveals Emergent Power Law of Arctic Methane Emissions

Methane (CH 4 ) emissions from thawing permafrost amplify a climate warming feedback. However, upscaling of site‐level CH 4 observations across diverse Arctic landscapes remains highly uncertain, compromising accuracy of current pan‐Arctic CH 4 budgets and confidence in model forecasts. We report a 30,000‐km 2 survey at 25‐m 2 resolution (~1 billion observations) of CH 4 hotspot patterns across Alaska and northwestern Canada using airborne imaging spectroscopy. Hotspots covered 0.2% of the surveyed area, concentrated in the wetland‐upland ecotone, and followed a two‐component power law as a function of distance from standing water. Hotspots decreased sharply over the first 40 m from standing water ( y = 0.21× −0.649 , R 2 = 0.97), mirroring in situ flux observations. Beyond 40 m, CH 4 hotspots diminished gradually over hundreds of meters ( y = 0.004× −0.164 , R 2 = 0.99). This emergent property quantifies the distribution of strong methanogenic zones from site to regional scales, vastly improving metrics for scaling ground‐based CH 4 inventories and validation of land models.