Posted on 08/17/2025 2:21:13 PM PDT by Eleutheria5
A new global study reveals that ancient carbon, once thought securely stored in soils and rocks, is leaking into the atmosphere via rivers.
For the first time, researchers have confirmed that carbon trapped in landscapes for thousands of years or longer can return to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide escaping from river surfaces.
The study, led by scientists from the University of Bristol and featured as the cover story in Nature, suggests that plants and upper soil layers may be absorbing about one additional gigaton of CO2 annually to balance this release. This highlights an even more critical role for vegetation and soils in slowing climate change.
Lead author Dr Josh Dean, Associate Professor in Biogeochemistry and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Bristol, said: “The results took us by surprise because it turns out that old carbon stores are leaking out much more into the atmosphere than previous estimates suggested. The implications are potentially huge for our understanding of global carbon emissions. Plants and trees take up CO2 from the atmosphere and can then lock this carbon away in soils for thousands of years.”
He continues, “Our findings show some of this old carbon, as well as ancient carbon from rocks, is leaking sideways into rivers and making its way back to the atmosphere. We don’t yet know how humans are affecting this flow of ancient carbon, but we do know plants and trees must be taking up more carbon from the atmosphere today to account for this unrecognized release of old carbon.”
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(Excerpt) Read more at scitechdaily.com ...
Or 88. Or 121. One of those two numbers means only one thing.
We should have gotten Joan together on the same show with Don Rickles.
Sort of depends on how small a particule of carbon we are talking about though doesn’t it?
Michelangelo painted the earliest known round of "pull my finger", btw. Here's a twofer.
I’m afraid we’re going to ‘get ourselves back to the garden’ the hard way.
An old article, hyped up to add fuel to climate hysteria.
Needless to say, there’s little to it.
Honestly, the best solution going and they employ such destructive ideas as carbon capture plants as great expense and destruction of the environment, all in the name of saving it.
Pawns of Satan, all.
No. They’re going to demand more taxes and more useless restrictions on our freedom.
Of course. They were racists and owned slaves.
Isaac Asimov also started out as a biochemist. Then he started writing fiction. It paid more and was more honest.
A comment about the Amazon Rain Forest. It is not a carbon sink. The vast majority of the trees that die in that forest become termite food. Termites fart methane and a lot. The methane enters the atmosphere but has a relatively short half life. It is broken down into CO2 (the dreaded gas) and water.
Yes the forest contributes O2 to the atmosphere but its removal of CO2 is minimal. Organic matter that flows down the Amazon River and buried in ocean sediments is a minor carbon sink. Oddly most of our O2 comes from algae in the oceans.
Carbon is found in many places and in many forms, but the way the author describes it, there should not be a gigatonne of (solid) carbon being released into rivers annually. Carbon dioxide, maybe.
“People are idiots, and the elite manipulate them with this propaganda.”
Should be “Democrats are idiots, and the elite manipulate them with this propaganda.”
Fixed it.
We should have gotten Joan together on the same show with Don Rickles.
They never met?
Total volume of CO2 in the atmosphere is only .03%.
Man made contributions to that are 3.225% of that .03%.
Not new and proves our carbon emissions, even if detrimental to climate are a drop in the bucket to Mother Nature, I say Greta shoild haul her in before The Hague 😂
This is obviously a dire situation that is more important than anything else. Luckily, if we raise taxes and return human civilization to the Stone Age, Mother Earth will heal. </sarc>
as usual, the climate catastrophists don’t really do science, they do fear-mongering and control
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