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
Revelation 13:18: Wisdom is needed here. Let the one with understanding solve the meaning of the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. His number is 666.
Six protons; six neutrons; six electrons
THE END IS NIGH (it could be for Gavin)
I suppose the question of what happens to dissolved carbon in the ocean is interesting enough. According to a rough google carbon is insoluble. So it probably settles down to the bottom of the ocean eventually as sediment. Hard to work up much curiosity, actually.
Biochar is just charcoal – note that “char.” The “bio” is semantically null. It’s produced at a considerably higher temperature than normal, traditionally burned charcoal, but forest fires actually burn at about the same temperature range in some phases, so a good deal of the forest fire charcoal is “char”. Forest fires have large fertizing effects for the same reasons you would want to add char to your vegetable garden and also because the ash contains use minerals that otherwise are locked into the wood. Following a fire the ash releases these nutrients back in to the soil. The immediate aftermath of a forest fire isn’t pretty, but a year later, there’s a flush of annual and perennial flowering plants that draw deer, elk, bear, photographers and other critters. I like fire areas for hunting in the early fall.
This paper sounds like a candidate for a Green Fleece award in the category of research whose only purpose is to generate additional funding..
@AndyG55 says:
April 19, 2013 at 3:44 pm
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.
Andy, I think you mean 2003. I was living in Ngunnawal, a suburb of Canberra in Gungahlin. We were already on alternate water days (for lawns, and things like washing the car) and headed to no water before the brushfires. We were in the depths of a pretty severe drought, which is not unknown in Oz. The level of Lake Burley-Griffon was way down, as were the levels in most reservoirs (there were jokes that soon, we’d be able to walk the streets of Acton—the original Acton, which was under lake Burley-Griffon, a man-made lake). The reservoirs that served the ACT were also silting up heavily because the amount of dust had increased with the drought, but the volume of water it landed in had shrunk. The filters were decades old, and not capable of keeping the amount of silt out, and the water levels had shrunk to amounts not seen since the filtration had been put in place—i.e., probably since before people weren’t using well water.
While the fires didn’t improve the situation, I can assure you they did not cause the problem—and part of the reason it took so long to fix was the cost: first, the ACT had to raise the funds, which was not a trivial exercise, plus the cost of all the damage done by the fires, which was huge, and there’s a very good argument that it was the Greens who were in large measure responsible, forcing people to build amidst the bush, not allowing the clearing of trees and with homes built around all that greenery, scheduled burning was nearly impossible. Too, there was the commercial pine forrestration, with all those needles and cones providing all that fuel. Parts of Canberra experienced firestorms just like Dresden, with cyclonic winds rushing in to the column of fire. And just like with Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, quite a few people, prophetically, stated clearly the risks and what needed to be done about them and were routinely ignored.
I’ve long since moved on, but I recall the days of the fire quite well. Like something out of an end-of-the-world movie, like midnight at noon, with a ruddy glow on the horizon, and ash drifting down everywhere.
This is sheer ignorance and/or deliberate lies. Pure charcoal (=carbon) is almost completely insoluble in water, chemically inert, extremely stable (and harmless). That’s why we find intact charcoal from forest fires (fusain) in geological layers up to 350 million years ago (no land plants before that). Some of this has of course always been washed down into the ocean to be incorporated into bottom sedimentd. What these people must be talking about are other organic compounds left by forest fires, which are soluble, and frequently more of less poisonous. These are usually broken down by bacterial action fairly rapidly and ultimately converted to CO2 and H2O. This is a very minor component in the carbon cycle of little importance except locally.
Though maybe good enough for grant in these hysterical times.
There are massive flows of carbonate into the ocean from dissolving rocks. (All the sinkholes in Florida, caves in the Karts Topography that gives us caves and incidentally some of the best water for making Bourbon in the country 😉
Shifting from “carbon” to “organic carbon” is just so that the miniscule percentage of “organic carbon” doesn’t look so incredibly unimportant and the charcoal portion nearly undetectable…