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Plant Roots Are Melting Permafrost And Unearthing Vast Stores of Carbon Emissions:
As plants begin to spread across melting permafrost, scientists are growing ever more worried their roots will stir microbes into unleashing vast stores of carbon.
To scientists, roots are known as rhizomes, and when these tendrils extend deeper into the soil, it accelerates microbial decomposition by up to fourfold, potentially 'priming' the frozen ground for further thawing.
This mechanism, known as the rhizosphere priming effect (RPE), has been known since the 1950s, and it could have a huge impact on one of Earth's most troubling carbon feedback loops.
Yet today, no climate models include rhizomes as a risk factor for melting permafrost - in large part because the data simply doesn't exist.
[...] For the first time, researchers have now combined high-resolution data on both the spread and depth of key plants growing in Arctic permafrost to determine how much carbon they are actually releasing.
As rising temperatures stimulate further plant growth, the researchers estimate that rhizome priming alone enhances the overall respiration of soil microbes by roughly 12 percent. By 2100, that means an absolute loss of around 40 billion tonnes of carbon from northern permafrost.
[...] To keep global warming under the 1.5 °C threshold, scientists have estimated that at a minimum we must keep our carbon emissions to 200 billion tonnes, and currently, 50 to 100 billion tonnes is put aside for thawing permafrost.
These new figures make up a quarter of that budget, which means there are minute and overlooked ecological interactions that we are clearly not taking into account.
Journal Reference:
Frida Keuper, Birgit Wild, Matti Kummu, et al. Carbon loss from northern circumpolar permafrost soils amplified by rhizosphere priming, Nature Geoscience (DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-0607-0)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2020, @01:33PM (7 children)
Scientists are always flip-flopping on this issue. Plants are supposed to be good? Or plants are supposed to be bad? Good or bad. With us or against us. It's time to make your mind up.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Monday July 27 2020, @01:46PM
Simple answers to ecology problems are wrong. This is usually the case when evolution is involved. It's also true for most biology problems. But news likes to give simple answers and explanations. That means that news likes to give the wrong answers to ecology and biology problems. This is LESS true in physics, as physics often has simple answers...not always, though.
P.S.: I'd say the same was true of economics and sociology, but we don't understand those well enough to be able to tell right answers from wrong ones, except in retrospect. Well...generally the question should really be "How wrong are the models, and in which direction?". The first phrasing implies that the models are occasionally correct.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2020, @03:03PM
Everyone overgeneralizes everything.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday July 27 2020, @05:09PM
You tell me: Is poison ivy good or bad?
You are only allowed to pick one by you own moronic rules.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2020, @05:40PM
>> Plants are supposed to be good? Or plants are supposed to be bad?
It depends on context. If the plants are used to feed cows which then give us steaks, the plants are good. But if some vegan tries to make you eat the plant in its unprocessed form, both the plant and the vegan are bad.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday July 27 2020, @06:21PM (1 child)
Plants are good when they're alive and taking CO2 out of the air. Plants are bad when they're dead and the decaying of their corpses is putting methane into the air. Plants are good when they're bringing coldness up from the ground and cooling the air. Plants are bad when they're bringing head down from their leaves and warming the ground.
Of course, that's if you're not trying to intentionally oversimplify the issue.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:48AM
Your sig suddenly takes on a sinister new meaning.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday July 27 2020, @10:37PM
No they're not. You're just applying a political insult to science, and science doesn't work like politics.