UF research gives clues about carbon dioxide patterns at end of Ice Age
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — New University of Florida research puts to rest the mystery of where old carbon was stored during the last glacial period. It turns out it ended up in the icy waters of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica.
The findings have implications for modern-day global warming, said Ellen Martin, a UF geological sciences professor and an author of the paper, which is published in this week’s journal Nature Geoscience.
“It helps us understand how the carbon cycle works, which is important for understanding future global warming scenarios,” she said. “Ultimately, a lot of the carbon dioxide that we’re pumping into the atmosphere is going to end up in the ocean. By understanding where that carbon was stored in the past and the pathways it took, we develop a better understanding of how much atmospheric carbon dioxide the oceans can absorb in the future.”
Scientists know that during the transition from the last glacial period to the current inter-glacial period about 14,000 years ago, carbon dioxide levels rose very quickly at the same time that the age of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fell, as measured by radiocarbon data. That suggests carbon dioxide had been stored in the ocean and suddenly released, she said.
One idea holds that it was building up in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, where extensive sea ice on the surface of the ocean initially prevented the exchange of gasses into the atmosphere, Martin said. The other possibility is that the same process occurred in the Northern Hemisphere with ice sheets in the North Pacific Ocean, she said.
In her lab, Martin and lead author Chandranath Basak, a UF graduate student in geological sciences; Keiji Horikawa, a UF postdoctoral fellow in geological sciences; and Thomas Marchitto, a University of Colorado geology professor, studied that question by using a technique to measure isotopes of neodymium, a rare earth element not commonly found in marine sediments but preserved in microscopic fossil fish teeth. The isotopic signature of a water mass, which is captured in the fish teeth, reflects the location where the water mass came from, she said.
“It’s essentially what we call a water mass tracer,” Martin said. “You can tell where the water masses have formed and where they have moved to by using this tracer.”
The researchers took samples that had been shown to have old carbon in them and measured the neodymium isotopes on fish teeth from the sediments to see if they could reconstruct whether they had come from the North Pacific or the Southern Ocean, she said.
“When we did this, we got a signal that looks very much like the Southern Ocean,” she said. “It implies that all the carbon was being stored in the Southern Hemisphere and as the ice sheet melted back, it released that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, causing part of the big increase in carbon dioxide and introducing old carbon back into the atmosphere.”
By giving information about environmental conditions during the last glacial period, the research findings can help scientists to reconstruct what the world was like at that time, she said.
The implications are that while large amounts of carbon could be stored in the ocean when there was a great deal of sea ice, the opposite is the case in a world that is warming, with less ice, which allows more carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere, Martin said. Thus, in a warming scenario the oceans may not be able to store as much carbon dioxide as they could under glacial conditions
The oceans are a critical part of the carbon dioxide cycle, Martin said. “The oceans have 60 times more carbon dioxide in them than the atmosphere, so when we worry about what’s happening with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we often look to the oceans as a potential source or sink.”
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during the glacial periods was about 200 parts per million, compared with 280 parts per million during a typical interglacial period, Martin said. Today that level has soared to about 380 parts per million, she said.
The time period that encompasses the last glacial period to the current interglacial period when carbon dioxide levels went up very quickly is often referred to as the “mystery interval” because scientists hadn’t known where the carbon was stored, Martin said.
“Now we have a better understanding of how the system worked,” she said.
One wonders how the sea life down there tolerated all that extra carbon resulting in “ocean acidification”.
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Translation: A lot of CO2 released to the atmosphere is “natural.”
Spin: Global warming is going to release more sequestered CO2 by melting Antarctic “ice sheets pullling back,” which means “it’s worse than we thought.”
Mr. Watts,
Thank you for posting this article which identifies another potential positive feedback to additional global warming.
“The implications are that while large amounts of carbon could be stored in the ocean when there was a great deal of sea ice, the opposite is the case in a world that is warming, with less ice, which allows more carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere, Martin said. Thus, in a warming scenario the oceans may not be able to store as much carbon dioxide as they could under glacial conditions.”
REPLY: You act as if this is news, any kid in high school chemistry class knows about the solubility of CO2 in water, in fact I’ve posted on it many times here on WUWT.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/co2-h2o_solubility.png
What’s news is that this team confirmed the southern ocean was the main sink then. This finding also points to why CO2 lags temperature in paleoclimate temperature and CO2 reconstructions.
– Anthony
So, effectively warm oceans release CO2, and cold ones store it?
Seems like something chemists have known for about 100 years now.
As a non-scientist, does this mean that the temperature had to drop before the CO2 could be sequestered in the water? Conversly, did the temperature have to rise before the gas was re-released into the atmosphere? Or have I misunderstood Boyle’s Law all these years?
Proudly funded by NSF with your money and mine! Science has truly become a contest to see who can write the most preposterous funding proposal.
So, does this support the theory that CO2 rises in response to warming (not causing it) ?
That is: warmer temps cause sea ice melt, and this causes co2 release from the oceans that the ice hindered before?
So, a rise of co2 concentrations follows the warming, and is not it’s cause it ?
Just these:
1) “Thus, in a warming scenario the oceans may not be able to store as much carbon dioxide as they could under glacial conditions”
Didn’t we already know this?
2) “The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during the glacial periods was about 200 parts per million, compared with 280 parts per million during a typical interglacial period”
Haven’t we already proven that in past interglacials it was much higher?
3) “introducing old carbon back into the atmosphere.”
Does “old carbon” have a similar chemical signature to fossil fuel carbon? Wouldn’t that confound the measurements of evil AGW carbon vs pristine polar bear carbon? (I guess that would be penguin carbon since it’s in Antarctica.)
It is good to see that these researchers understand that a warmer ocean allows more CO2 in the atmosphere to allow more biological activity through photosynthesis which provides more O2 for the animal kingdom to breath.
Their shells grew thicker?
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=7545&tid=282&cid=63809&ct=162
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;320/5874/336
Stop the alarm over acidic oceans!!!
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006…/2006GL026305.shtml
I do not understand the notion of new and old carbon dioxide. If carbon dioxide was stored, how is it older or younger than the carbon dioxide that was not stored. Is this a press release gaffe?
‘…rare earth isotopes…. water mass tracer…you can tell where the water mass has formed….microscopic fish teeth….we’re getting a signal that looks very much like the southern ocean….’
‘Hey…wake up…wake up!’
‘Huh?’
‘You were talking in your sleep.’
‘What was I saying?’
‘Dunno…sounded like complete bollocks to me.’
So, cooler oceans sequester CO2 and warmer oceans release CO2. Who would have guessed?
A fizzy drink, loses its fizz quicker, as it gets warmer. Another way to reduce the fizz quicker is to reduce atmospheric pressure. The reverse may also be true. Different laws of physics apply to oceans.
The fizz is CO2, and putting it into drinks, to make them fizzy, has yet to be targeted for cap and trade, so the fizzy drink industry must be capturing all its CO2 from the atmosphere, rather than producing CO2 by other means. Could the fizzy drinks industry share the secret, they could save the world?
I do not seem to be getting any of the Big Oil money that (allegedly) slushes around these sites, so can I get some AGW grant funding instead please?
‘The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during the glacial periods was about 200 parts per million, compared with 280 parts per million during a typical interglacial period, Martin said. Today that level has soared to about 380 parts per million, she said.’
My God is she going to have a bitch fit if CO2 doubles, even though it won’t affect temperatures as predicted.
Bernie said:
“I do not understand the notion of new and old carbon dioxide. If carbon dioxide was stored, how is it older or younger than the carbon dioxide that was not stored. Is this a press release gaffe?”
Nope. Stored carbon is a small percentage C-14, which eventually decays to N-14 through beta decay. We can use the isotopic ratio of a carbon source to determine its age up to about 50,000 years old. So, “old carbon” is simply carbon with depleted C-14.
“When we did this, we got a signal that looks very much like the Southern Ocean,” she said. “It implies that all the carbon was being stored in the Southern Hemisphere
Doesn’t that just mean their samples were all from the south? Unless they’re implying that there were no fish in the north.
Bernie says October 25, 2010 at 2:58 pm: “If carbon dioxide was stored, how is it older or younger than the carbon dioxide that was not stored. Is this a press release gaffe?”
Not a press release gaffe, it’s just climate “science.”
’Twas brillig, and the slithy trace
Did gyre and gimble in the water mass;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths on old carbon.
poor UF, UF is trying so hard to be cutting edge climate science….
Watching all that money pass them by….
So, are they proposing a non-mixing portion of the ocean? If that’s it then it doesn’t seem plausible. Are there any examples of this that we can observe (besides brine pools in deep water which are probably maintained by the life forms that live in them).
[comment is way oversized -please break it up into smaller posts ~mod]
“The oceans have 60 times more carbon dioxide in them than the atmosphere”
Does this partly cause the sine wave in the CO2 graph from Hawaii? The Northern Hemisphere is removing CO2 while Antartica stops producing it?
So 1.3% change in ocean CO2 doubles/halves current atmospheric CO2. What percentage is lost or gained when long term climate warms and cools? This neatly correlates the delay between temperature and CO2.
Jacob says:
October 25, 2010 at 2:48 pm
“So, does this support the theory that CO2 rises in response to warming (not causing it) ?That is: warmer temps cause sea ice melt, and this causes co2 release from the oceans that the ice hindered before?So, a rise of co2 concentrations follows the warming, and is not it’s cause it ?”
Jacob, any true climate scientist knows that natural, non-CO2 forcings are very weak and can only produce just a little bit of temporary warming – way less than 0.5C for sure. This little bit of non-CO2 forcing caused a release of CO2 from the oceans, which caused a lot more warming that set off a cascade of positive feedbacks, which ended the glacial period. Therefore, substantial increases in atmospheric CO2 always do the heavy lifting in any global warming scenario. All the climate models approved by true climate scientists confirm this.
Now you can clearly understand how all true climate scientists happily ignore that the actual data indicate warming at the end of each glacial period always preceeded increases in CO2 by several hundred years.
“isotopes of neodymium, a rare earth element not commonly found in marine sediments but preserved in microscopic fossil fish teeth.”
Interesting. Neodymium is the stuff the Chinese make superstrong magnets from. I wonder if fish use it for navigational purposes.
Did anyone see the Antarctica penninsula?. We´re looking for it 🙂
It starts from the same falsified hypothesis, or rather BELIEF from the church of GW, while stirring their CO2 incense burners. Holy betwetters! More of the same CO2 concoction, now from fish teeth!…
Interesting article and observations but I think that you have to note that CO2 sequesters naturally in the oceans (after all they were studying fish teeth) by precipitating out carbonate rocks such as limestone and dolomite. Calcium carbonate has an odd solubility, its less soluble in warm water than in cold. But even the solubility is not so simple as the CO2 in water can be carbonic acid or a bi-carbonate which actually increases the solubility of calcium in the presence of CO2. When you think about the southern oceans or any other oceans for that matter, you also have to keep in mind the currents take water loaded with carbonate and bi-carbonate ions and transport these toward the equator where the water is warmer leading to breakdown of the soluble calcium bicarbonate ions into CO2 (g) and calcium carbonate (s) so half the carbon dioxide gets precipitated out. (Think of all the limestone deposits in the tropics as well at the amount of limestone rock that is a permanent repository of formerly gaseous CO2. I personally like point out view from the edge of the Grand Canyon to anyone who doesn’t believe CO2 can be sequestered.) So I wonder out loud if the results of this study may indicate that the mechanism for transporting CO2 from the cold polar regions to the warm tropic regions might have been shut down during the glacial periods and when the glaciers melted, did it bring this bicarbonate saturated water back to the equatorial regions to release half the gas that was simple dissolved?