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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The ocean is the ultimate solution.
From a Frank Zappa Album.
Desperation is spreading through academia, the shadow of reality is falling across their future plans. Expect panic.
‘The new findings are important to better calculate the global carbon budget.’
Why don’t they spend a little time to better calculate Obama’s budget. But, then maybe the numbers are way, way, way too big to comprehend.
I call your attention to “terra preta,” the dark earth of the Amazon. A totally human-developed humic resource that provided fertile soil to sustain whole civilizations prior to the european invasions. Cornell University scientists, among others examined this human-derived resource that turned graphic carbon (biochar) into a rich soil. –thousands of years ago…
Why is it the the (greenies/libs/AGW types) LOVE organic but HATE carbon?
Per Wiki:
The Appalachian Mountains (Listeni/ˌæpəˈleɪʃɨn/ or /ˌæpəˈlætʃɨn/[note 1]), often called the Appalachians, are a system of mountains in eastern North America. The Appalachians first formed roughly 480 million years ago during the Ordovician Period, and once reached elevations similar to those of the Alps and the Rocky Mountains before they were eroded.
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Mountains washed into the oceans, and they still do.
Try another tack.
I like dissolved carbon, particularly the CO2 form in tonic water!
MtK
Did they finally get around to doing their 3rd grade science homework?
Some of your previous posters have referred to bush fires -yes that’s what we call them – in Australia. Long before Europeans settled here, around 1780, the locals were assiduous lighters of fires; its a hunting technique. A similar practice was followed in New Guinea. So many thousand years of local bushfire cultures need to be examined before any sense at all can be made of this latest somewhat nonsensical research.
Thankfully we put out most forrest fires in the last century globally.
Do we actually have more trees than we did in1901 now in the USA due to that fact?
I was kinda climatologically scared when I read this post. The models don’t model for that ya know!
“And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually”
-thanks Jimi
There’s carbon in the water too? Freaking great. Bad enough it has fish poo but now carbon. It really is worse than we thought. We’re all going to die.
These 2 points stood out for me:
Where else have we often heard that ‘Most scientists [insert your own common held but subsequently proven false assertion here]’?
Why is it that the carbon cycle excludes carbon in its many forms on/in the land if it only enters the cycle once it reaches the sea?
Colour [sic Aussie English spelling] me confused!!
Well I have always said that I could cope with whatever climate change sent but if carbon ever got into the oceans it was all over. That’s it. I’m done.
I am going to now retreat into a cave for the rest of my life and pray to gaia for forgiveness.
I don’t understand the fuss over 25 million tons of carbon being sequestered in the Ocean per year. The Oean Productivity Page http://www.science.oregonstate.edu/ocean.productivity/index.php estimates that of the more than 100 Gigatons of carbon sequestered per year, approximately half or over 50 Gigatons is stored in the ocean. Now this number is the net number, which means that it is what was left after a lot was used or burned to sustain the plant life or oxidized in some other manner. What is 25 megatons to 50 gigatons?
For those interested in the carbon cycle there is a 2004 paper that is good because it gives you the detailed steps involved in making productivity estimates. It is here http://www.terrapub.co.jp/e-library/kawahata/pdf/343.pdf
This paper estimates a productivity of 60.4Gtc per year net and 124.7 gross. The energy absorbed to produce the gross productivity was 191.3X10E21 joules or 1.9X10E23 joules. When you see the net is about half; you have about 10E23 joules being converted to chemical energy and being removed from the environment. This estimate is low compared to the Productivity page and the actual amount is probably considerably than 10E23 joules. This could be part of the missing heat.
We probably shouldn’t tell them we use charcoal in salt and freshwater tanks to purify the water …
OssQss says:
April 19, 2013 at 5:58 pm
Thankfully we put out most forrest fires in the last century globally.
Do we actually have more trees than we did in1901 now in the USA due to that fact?
__________________
Perhaps, partially for that reason.
A sure sign of civilization is the presence of trees. Just look at our cities and suburbs- my own town could easily be considered a forest, we just don’t think of it that way.
We no longer burn wood as our primary fuel source, nor do we practice slash and burn agriculture, nor even need to devote so many acres to agricultural efforts, due to improved methods of production (and increased plant food in the form of CO2). As result, many acres being no longer plowed and tended, have reverted to brush/timber. Also, the timber industry has learned to plant far more acres in trees than they cut.
In a way, forests can become their own worst enemy, as they can build up enough dead combustible material to feed a fire which only God’s heavy rain can stop.
Luther Wu says:
April 19, 2013 at 5:59 pm
“And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually”
-thanks Jimi
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LOL, you had to go there. It is Friday though 🙂
to “Elmer says”
carbonated water, as usually sold, is stuffed full of fructose and it will give you fatty liver disease and make you obese.
Take water, add carbon – organic water!
I wonder what the solubility of carbon is in water. Ah, perhaps they were dissolving it in acid rain. I’ve never tried that. I’ll collect some tonight.
BFD. As if the carbon budget was important. It’s an aspect of biology but clearly not worth the millions they are spending on it.
Oh Dear
Color me Carboniferous Period,
Lacking acidification extreme,
Just a buffered reaction in the mean,
Without need of an IPCC Scheme.
CodeTech says:
April 19, 2013 at 2:13 pm
“I’m sure some of the older readers will recall the phrase this makes me think of: “As god is my witness…. I thought turkeys could fly”.”
For the younger readers, the famous phrase comes after an unsuccessful free turkey drop from a helicopter into a parking lot by WKRP radio:
The Dead Sea makes for a more manageable and convenient case study. One such study of a couple of decades ago seems to call the soot POC–particulate organic carbon–and makes no attempt to distinguish between soot from trees and soot from coal (p.189):
http://books.google.com/books?id=nlWRHnz7zSsC&pg=PA196&lpg=PA196&dq=dead+sea+carbon+content&source=bl&ots=j1XcuGaCyM&sig=fVK-DYCVIJPxrPvgHi_D-gkXSqs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XAFyUYm3NdH-qAG9z4HYAw&ved=0CD0Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=dead%20sea%20carbon%20content&f=false
But they did make some educated guesses as to the percentage of dissolved POC compared to other sources of carbon. –AGF
I’m reading this pretty differently than some commenters.
As we know, biochar has been suggested as a major geoengineering project to sequester carbon dioxide by people like James Hansen. The biochar theory is that materials with carbon in them could be added to agricultural soil (among other places) and the carbon materials would stay in place.
Now imagine world governments applying the biochar theory and funding massive biochar projects to sequester carbon. For example, you could burn municipal waste and use the energy from the pyrolysis to help fund the process. Utility companies would be totally on board with this.
The process is much cheaper than carbon capture and storage. (*Everything in this paragraph is fair game for you to make up your own sarcastic comment*).
This study of Jaffe et. al. suggests that the biochar theory, as previously envisioned, might be naive. A fair bit of the carbon materials will just leach out of the soil and wind up in rivers and oceans. Hence, I understand Jaffe et. al. to be saying that these projects could fail massively. (The actual research is behind a paywall so its possible I missed something important).
Sounds like a good way to sequester money from the government…