A massive gas leak in the Los Angeles area that was first announced in October is still leaking. The company that operates the storage facility where the leak happened says the leak could be capped as early as the end of the week.Most of the leaking gas is the greenhouse gas methane, which is harmful to the environment. But how harmful is it?Every week for the past few months, University of California, Davis researcher Stephen Conley has been flying a small, specially equipped plane into a huge plume of methane to measure the gas that has been leaking uncontrollably into the atmosphere.Conley flies over natural gas storage facilities all the time. And he always sees small gas leaks. But when he was first asked to fly over this big leak in November, he was shocked by what he found."I'd never seen measurements like that before," he says. "So my first reaction was crap, what just happened? Did I hit too much turbulence and some laser got out of alignment? So my first question was that
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