In what one researcher calls “a gigantic discrepancy,” a new study says oil and natural gas production appear to be to blame for a much larger portion of spiraling methane levels in Earth’s atmosphere than previously believed.

Methane is one of the most powerful of the greenhouse gases that boost global warming and climate change. Its concentration in the air has more than doubled since the pre-industrial era.

The findings “add urgency of efforts to rein in methane emissions from the fossil fuel industry, which routinely leaks or intentionally releases the gas into air,” reports the New York Times.

“The extent to which fossil fuel emissions, as opposed to natural sources, are responsible for the rising methane levels has long been a matter of scientific debate,” the Times says, noting that methane seeps from the ocean floor, as well as from so-called “mud volcanoes” on land.

“To shed light on the mystery,” the Times says, researchers “examined ice cores from Greenland, as well as data from Antarctica stretching back to about 1750, before the industrial revolution.”

The study, by researchers at the University of Rochester, was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“We’ve identified a gigantic discrepancy that shows the industry needs to, at the very least, improve their monitoring,” said the study’s lead author, Benjamin Hmiel. “If these emissions are truly coming from oil, gas extraction, production use, the industry isn’t even reporting or seeing that right now.”

The researchers “found that methane emissions from natural phenomena were far smaller than estimates used to calculate global emissions. That means fossil-fuel emissions from human activity — namely the production and burning of fossil fuels — were underestimated by 25 to 40 percent,” the Times says.

Methane is the main component of natural gas and is “of particular concern,” because it can warm the planet more than 80 times as much as carbon dioxide over a given period of time. Along with fossil-fuel production, methane is emitted by cattle and other livestock, landfills and other sources linked to human activity.

“Adding to climate concerns, the Trump administration is moving forward with a plan that effectively eliminates requirements that oil companies install technology to detect and fix methane leaks from oil and gas facilities,” the Times says. “By the Environmental Protection Agency’s own calculations, the rollback would increase methane emissions by 370,000 tons through 2025.”