Good resource to download movie. A lot of movies online, free movies.


Good resource to download movie. A lot of movies online, free movies.

Ocean absorbs billions of tons of man-made carbon each year

OceanResearchers have pieced together a history of the ocean’s absorption of industrial-era carbon, published this week in Nature.

The ocean sucks up a large fraction of carbon dioxide emissions, but figuring out exactly how much has been difficult. A team used records of ocean temperature, salinity, chemical tracers, and other data, as well as models of ocean mixing, to estimate the amount of carbon from anthropogenic sources entering the ocean since 1765.

As of 2008, the ocean contained 140 billion metric tons of anthropogenic carbon and was taking in 2.3 billion tons more per year, the researchers report. The amount absorbed annually has shot up over the last half-century, but the rate has been increasing slightly less quickly since the 1980s. Because of large uncertainties, that recent slowdown may not be statistically significant, says co-author Timothy Hall of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. However, he says, it is consistent with expectations that the ocean’s ability to take up carbon dioxide will eventually saturate.

The team also found that the land turned from a carbon dioxide source to a sink around the 1940s. One possible explanation is that the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is providing more “food” for photosynthesis, leading to a fertilization effect, says Hall. – Roberta Kwok

Source: Khatiwala, S., Primeau, F., & Hall, T. (2009). Reconstruction of the history of anthropogenic CO2 concentrations in the ocean Nature, 462 (7271), 346-349 DOI: 10.1038/nature08526

Image © MichaelJay, iStockPhoto.com

Filed Under Climate change, Marine | 

Email This Post Email This Post

Comments

Leave a Reply







Full-length hd, dvd, divx download movies resource. See also rmvb player and directshow decoder