The majority of methane produced in many anoxic sediments is released via ebullition. These bubbles are subject to dissolution as they rise, and dissolution rates are strongly influenced by bubble size. Current understanding of natural methane bubble size distributions is limited by the difficulty in measuring bubble sizes over wide spatial or temporal scales. Our custom optical bubble size sensors recorded bubble sizes and release timing at 8 locations in Upper Mystic Lake, MA continuously for 3 months. Bubble size distributions were spatially heterogeneous even over relatively small areas experiencing similar flux, suggesting that localized sediment conditions are important to controlling bubble size. There was no change in bubble size distributions over the 3 month sampling period, but mean bubble size was positively correlated with daily ebullition flux. Bubble data was used to verify the performance of a widely used bubble dissolution model, and the model was then used to estimate that bubble dissolution accounts for approximately 10% of methane accumulated in the hypolimnion during summer stratification, and at most 15% of the diffusive air–water–methane flux from the epilimnion.

中文翻译：

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淡水湖中甲烷气泡的大小分布，通量和溶解度

许多缺氧沉积物中产生的大部分甲烷都是通过沸腾释放的。这些气泡随着上升而易于溶解，并且溶解速度受气泡大小的强烈影响。当前对天然甲烷气泡尺寸分布的理解受到在较大的空间或时间尺度上测量气泡尺寸的困难所限制。我们的定制光学气泡大小传感器连续3个月在马萨诸塞州上神秘湖的8个地点记录了气泡大小和释放时间。甚至在相对较小的区域，通量相似的气泡区域中，气泡尺寸分布在空间上也是不均匀的，这表明局部沉积物条件对于控制气泡尺寸非常重要。在3个月的采样期内，气泡尺寸分布没有变化，但平均气泡大小与每日沸腾通量呈正相关。气泡数据用于验证广泛使用的气泡溶出度模型的性能，然后该模型用于估计气泡溶出度大约占夏季分层过程中低层积水中甲烷累积量的10％，最多占扩散量的15％。 the水产生的空气-水-甲烷通量。