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Planes Sampling Air Above the Amazon Find the Rainforest is Releasing More Carbon Than It Stores

posted by mrpg on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:46PM   Printer-friendly

upstart writes:

Planes Sampling Air Above the Amazon Find the Rainforest is Releasing More Carbon Than it Stores - Inside Climate News:

Over the last several years researchers have said that the Amazon is on the verge of transforming from a crucial storehouse for heat-trapping gasses to a source of them, a dangerous shift that could destabilize the atmosphere of the planet.

Now, after years of painstaking and inventive research, they have definitively measured that shift.

In a study published Wednesday in Nature, a team of researchers led by scientists from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, reported results from measuring carbon concentrations in columns of air above the Amazon. They found that the massive continental-size swath of tropical forest is releasing more carbon dioxide than it accumulates or stores, thanks to deforestation and fires.

“There is no doubt that the Amazon is a source,” said Luciana Gatti, the lead author of the study.

Journal Reference:
Luciana V. Gatti, Luana S. Basso, John B. Miller, et al. Amazonia as a carbon source linked to deforestation and climate change, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03629-6)

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @11:10AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @11:10AM (#1157839)

    Eventually rot evolved the ability to digest wood - but for roughly 320x as long as humanity has existed, woody plants thrived without anything that could eat their stems

    How is this informative?? Plain fucking wrong. Fungus (your 'rot') exists longer than the trees.

    Ever heard of bogs? Notice how they work today, unless you go ahead and destroy them.

    It's like education doesn't exist anymore

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday July 19 2021, @01:24PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Monday July 19 2021, @01:24PM (#1157865)

    Yes, rot existed longer than trees - but for a *very* long time after wood first evolved, rot couldn't digest it. The same newly-evolved stabilizing molecule that made plant material strong and woody (lignin I think?) also prevented rot, and anything else, from being able to digest it.

  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday July 19 2021, @01:34PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Monday July 19 2021, @01:34PM (#1157868)

    And yes, there are other ways to prevent rot under very particular circumstances - even just rapidly and permanently submerging it can preserve it for centuries. There's whole companies dedicated to logging the old forests that were submerged under artificial lakes.

    But they weren't necessary during that roughly 80 million year window when wood everywhere on Earth failed to decompose because nothing could eat it, and just got slowly buried under ever more dust and biomass instead, with the heat and pressure eventually turning it into coal.