New research from The University of Western Australia has revealed that plants make their own ‘secret’ decisions about how much carbon to release back into the atmosphere via a previously unknown process, a discovery with “profound implications” for the use of plants as carbon stores.
Using lake sediment in the Tibetan Plateau, a team of researchers was able to show that permafrost at high elevations is more vulnerable than arctic permafrost under projected future climate conditions.
Posted: Jan 22, 2021 Deep sea fossilized skeletons from 45 million years ago. Credit: Stanley A. Kling, Scripps IO. Predictions of future climate change require a clear and nuanced understanding of Earth’s past climate. University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa oceanographers solved a controversy that has been debated in scientific literature for decades by fully reconciling climate and carbon cycle trends of the past 50 million years. Their research was published in Throughout Earth’s history, global climate and the global carbon cycle have undergone significant changes, some of which challenge the current understanding of carbon cycle dynamics. Less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cools Earth and decreases weathering of rocks and minerals on land over long time scales. Less weathering should lead to a shallower calcite compensation depth (CCD), which is the depth in the ocean where the rate of carbonate material raining down equals the rate of carbo
Enough carbon dioxide has already entered the atmosphere to cause global warming in excess of 2 degrees Celsius regardless of future efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, according to scientists from