Methane built up in landlls as a result of breaking down of organic materials can be a renewable energy source if it is taken advantage of. The aim of research presented in this paper is to detect landll gas (that contains methane) by means of terrestrial laser scanning. The hypothesis is that where no surface leakage has been reported, the landll gas will expand or migrate. Therefore, it is possible to detect it through repeated scanning of the same area and comparison of Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) generated from the point clouds. Only the most signicant movements, i.e. vertical, are of interest in this case. During September–November 2011, a small area at Forsbacka landll in the vicinity of Gävle was scanned 10 times. Epoch-to-epoch comparisons of the resulting DTMs have shown two signicant changes (–27 and +19 mm) in elevation of the surface, and it is not impossible that they are caused by migrating landll gas. The method tested in this study is deemed to be rigorous and accurate for detecting small-scale swell-shrink behaviour of the ground surface (in our case a landll surface). However, both data processing and interpretation of the results have been considerably complicated by presence of low vegetation (weeds) on the study site, which was di-cult to lter away completely from the data. Based on our pilot study, we recommend that a larger area and a longer period of time are chosen to give basis for more grounded conclusions about presence of landll gas.