From the Oh Noes department and the Max Planck Institute comes this headline sure to cause worry worts scurrying for carbon removing water filters:
Massive amounts of charcoal enter the worlds’ oceans
Wild fire residue is washed out of the soil and transported to the sea by rivers
Wild fires turn millions of hectares of vegetation into charcoal each year. An international team of researchers led by Thorsten Dittgar from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen and Rudolf Jaffé from Florida International University’s Southeast Environmental Research Center in Miami has now shown that this charcoal does not remain in the soil, as previously thought. Instead, it is transported to the sea by rivers and thus enters the carbon cycle. The researchers analyzed water samples from all over the world. They demonstrated that soluble charcoal accounts for ten percent of the total amount of dissolved organic carbon.
“Most scientists thought charcoal was resistant. They thought, once it is incorporated into the soils, it would stay there,” says Rudolf Jaffé from Florida International University’s Southeast Environmental Research Center in Miami. But if that were the case, the soils would be black.” Most of the charcoal in nature is from wild fires and combustion of biomass in general. When charcoal forms it is typically deposited in the soil.“ From a chemical perspective, no one really thought it dissolves, but it does,” Jaffé says. “It doesn’t accumulate like we had for a long time believed. Rather, it is transported into wetlands and rivers, eventually making its way to the oceans.”
Thorsten Dittmar from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen focuses on carbon chemistry in the oceans. “To understand the oceans we have to understand also the processes on the land, from where the organic load enters the seas”, Dittmar says.
The international team, which also included researchers from Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Georgia, Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, the USDA Forest Service, and the University of Helsinki in Finland, had taken 174 water samples from all over the world, including rivers like the Amazon, the Congo, the Yangtze as well as Arctic sites.
Surprisingly, in any river across the world about ten percent of organic carbon that is dissolved in the water came from charcoal. With this robust relationship in hand they estimated the global flux of dissolved charcoal, based on previous scientific studies that focused on organic carbon flux. According to these estimates, about 25 million tons of dissolved charcoal is transported from land to the sea each year.
The new findings are important to better calculate the global carbon budget. This budget is a balancing act between sources that produce carbon and sinks that remove it. Detailed calculations are important to assess climatic effects and find ways to alleviate them.
Until now, researchers could only provide rough estimates of the amount of charcoal in the soil, and most of these estimates turned out to be wrong, as the total amout is determined by charcoal producing processes, like wild fires, and transport to the oceans.
According to the authors, the results imply that greater consideration must be given to carbon sequestration techniques (the process of capture and long-term storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide). Biochar addition to soils is one such technique. Biochar technology is based on vegetation-derived charcoal that is added to agricultural soils as a means to store carbon. Although promising in storing carbon, Jaffé points out that as more people implement biochar technology, they must take into consideration the potential dissolution of the charcoal to ensure these techniques are actually environmentally friendly.
Jaffé and Dittmar agree that there are still many unknowns when it comes to the environmental fate of charcoal, and both plan to move on to the next phase of the research. They have proven where the charcoal goes. Next, they want to answer how this happens and what the environmental consequences are. The better scientists can understand the processes and the environmental factors controlling it, the better the chance of developing strategies for carbon sequestration and help mitigate climate change.
Source: http://www.mpg.de/7112434/charcoal_oceans
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So the question is: with more charcoal in the rivers and oceans, how does this affect the albedo? Does it cause the oceans to warm faster? – Anthony
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Worry is the commodity that socialists mass-produce so that they can sell nothing to idiots for quite a good price.
And upon further review, we spot the linguistic trick. 10% of the dissolved organic carbon is charcoal. The other 90% is some other organic, like dead fish, peat, rotten wood, grass clippings, spilled oil,… CO2, which outweighs them all by an order of magnitude, is of course not organic.
Even more nonsense, since the first thing the paper did was shift the context from carbon compounds to organic carbon compounds, and then assert that charcoal is among the organics (which technically it is not once it is really charcoal).
Magicians use three cups and a pea to perform similar tricks.
Point one: the 90 acres that I managed for 25 years had black loams from fires in the past, but NO BLACK where the soils were clay soils, To say all soils should be char black is a bit of an unsupported sweeping statement.
two: If the soils aren’t black because the world wide charcoal from the worldwide fires is dissolved and leached into the rivers, why aren’t the rivers black?
three: what is the colour of a charcoal solution? and does the washing of coal ,waste a lot of product?
In fire crazy Australia, our impacted rivers and streams run BROWN and the discharge into the sea is brown (from suspended clays). Worrying about reduced albedo fron “dissolved charcoal”
might be like worrying about tooth ache in the time left after swallowing cyanide.
Charcoal was entering the water and traveling to oceans since the first plants on land caught fire. Strangely, the planet remains habitable to this day. The research grants spent on this would be of more use if they were equally turned into ashes and thrown into a river.
What’s next, a side mention that diamonds slowly dissolve in water? Gee, maybe that’s why I hear of old shipwrecks with sapphires, emeralds, and rubies, but rarely diamonds. Don’t wear your diamond jewelry in the hot tub!
This might also explain why Pennsylvania coal country is so prone to sinkholes. It has been thought the cave-ins of old mines are at fault. But clearly it could also be groundwater dissolving away the coal seams!
If people were told what was frequently found dissolved in dihydrogen monoxide, they would demand the immediate banning of this toxic potent solvent. Do you know people who pay more and are thrilled to use Sea Salt instead of common NaCl? Ask them why they prefer uranium and arsenic on their food.
No, it ain’t. But water in your carbon, now that is a concern.
“…greater consideration must be given to carbon sequestration techniques (the process of capture and long-term storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide). Biochar addition to soils is one such technique. Biochar technology is based on vegetation-derived charcoal that is added to agricultural soils as a means to store carbon.”
??? Since when is charcoal made of carbon dioxide?
Oh, I see, since the greens have started to call carbon dioxide “carbon”. Go figure.
Last time I tried to fire up my BBQ with CO2 it didn’t burn very well. On the contrary.
I think we need a new term. How does “Formula Science” sound? Sort of the science version of “Formula Writing” as in Harlequin Romances, Hardy Boys, etc. Same plot regurgitated over and over again. Here’s the “plot” from Formula Science:
1. Measure something.
2. Express surprise at the results.
3. Justify funding for additional study.
4. Upon receipt of funding Go To 1.
Yes folks, we have achieved Formula Science and it is an infinite loop.
Does anyone know what harm the amounts of dissolved charcoal does in the oceans as per this study?
What a load of utter and complete crap. How can we humans ever hope to compete with nature in this area. The biosphere is greening so don’t do a damned thing. What a load of bollocks.
Carbon is chemically inert. It cannot be dissolved in acids alkalies or water. A simple fact that grade one students of chemistry knows.
Is the uncontrolled burning of bushland new or has it been going on forever? If forever there must be a lot of accumulated damage done. Where is the evidence of this damage? Right next to the atmospheric hot spot.
In the old days with uncontrolled wildfires running rampant throughout the world, I’m sure there was plenty of charcoal washing into the rivers and oceans, maybe even more so than today where we supress most wildfires. So what’s to worry about? No big deal for mother nature.
The Greens are known to hate humanity. And humans are a carbon-based life form.
So they started by trying to demonise CO2, and now they’re onto actual carbon. Soon they will be telling us that our bodies are full of dangerous carbon molecules, and we have to burn them to save the planet…
“about 25 million tons of dissolved charcoal is transported from land to the sea each year”
If that’s true, this amount is absolutely insignificant. Carbon in annual CO₂ emissions is about 8 billion tonnes, that is, 320 times more. More than half of that ends up in the oceans, so Dittgar et al. are whining about several tenths of a percent marine carbon uptake. Do these guys think everyone freezes dead as soon as confronted with numbers?
Trouble is that in forest fires, the run-off after the fire isn’t just charcoal. It can contain all sorts of other stuff, some of it not nice.
In 2005 (I think it was) after the big bushfires in Canberra, Australia, one of their major reservoirs became highly overloaded with black sludge, and they had to take the reservoir off line for something like 2 years so they could aerate the stuff and let the water become usable again. This meant that really harsh water restrictions had to be put in place.
But that was a bit off-topic. The point that these so called scientists didn’t know that charcoal from bushfires has ALWAYS eventually been washed down rivers to the sea, and has always been part of the NATURAL carbon cycle, totally astounds me. !
Are these guys ‘social scientists’, or something ???
Solutions desperately in search of a problem.
You mean like carbonated water? What’s wrong with that?
They can’t be this stupid shirley. Must be a money-grab.
A few years back, I was at a local Landcare workshop. This was when these events included pollies, regulators, cattle people, farmers, hippies, greenies, representatives of the-rest-of-us. An uneasy alliance even then. One item in the presentation – land (here at least) accumulates material at about 4 tonnes per hectare p.a. on average. [source 1=”longer” 2=”findable” language=”no”][/source]. The point being made was, yes, erosion and run-off is an issue, but prevention is also an issue. We have shoreline currents carrying sediments northwards. If the supply is cut off, the beaches erode. It’s a natural cycle, and we need to be careful trying to manage it.
This image linked below shows an in-ground telephone pit in front of our place. Been there maybe 25 years. The concrete box was originally at surface level and has not subsided. The only vehicle that has driven over it is the postie on a Honda CT110. The surface has not been disturbed other than by mowing. The gap is the result of natural accumulation. The yellow frame was put there by the phone company because this is now a trip hazard.
Loads of these around here, commonly referred to as “Telstra heritage sites”.
Are they saying that ALL the soluble charcoal “does not remain in the soil,..”?
Are they saying that ALL the soluble charcoal goes into the seas and oceans?
As one commenter has already indicated, carbon (charcoal) is insoluble in water. That is, it doesn’t dissolve in water. Something is wrong with the original report or the interpretation here.
Let me be the first to say:
“It’s worse than we thought!”
This process has been going on since the Oceans, Rivers and Rain began. It is nothing new and got us to where we are now without difficulties, It’s effects on climate are natural. We cannot control this. the atmospheric concentration of CO2, or Quiet the Sun, Oceans or the Wind.
Carbon is food for marine bacteria.
Will wonders of nature ever cease? Nice to know how nature works but so what. That is evidently a process that has been going on ever since the plants colonized dry land. And now bio-char is one more thing to add to their computer models. The more things you put into those models the easier it is to jigger their output so that you get exactly what you think the climate ought to be doing. Of course you need a supercomputer costing at least 50 million but Uncle Sam has deep pockets for that.
How much impact is 25 million tons of charcoal per year on the ocean? (Back of the Envelope)
Mass of the Earth’s Ocean = 1.40E+21 kg
Amount of Charcoal / yr = 2.50E+10 kg
Charcoal concentration = 1.79E-02 mcg / kg ocean / yr
Charcoal concentration = 17.9 g / km^3 ocean / yr
Charcoal density = 0.208 g/cm^3 (coal = 1.2-1.5, graphite= 2.1-2.23)
<bIF we assume all that charcoal floats and never sinks (worst case)….
Area of the earth oceans (A) 3.60E+08 km2
Area of the earth oceans (A) 3.60E+18 cm2
Mass of Charcoal / yr / cm2 ocean = 6.94E-06 g/yr/cm2
Volume of charcoal / yr / cm2 ocean = 3.34E-05 cm3/yr/cm2
Thickness of Charcoal accumulating on ocean / yr = 0.334 micron / yr
So it would take 3000 years to accumulate a 1 mm skin of charcoal as a surface on the ocean.
Since we don’t see rafts of charcoal, that charcoal must sink to the bottom at that same S L O W rate. Pelagic sedimentation rates are in the range 1 to 10 mm / thousand years. Charcoal is NOT a major part of deep water sediment cores, so the charcoal gets burried in deltas along with all the silt.