A new study predicts that warming temperatures will contribute to the release into the atmosphere of carbon that has long been locked up securely in the coldest reaches of our planet.
Soil and climate expert Katherine Todd-Brown, a scientist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, is an author of the paper, published in the Dec. 1 issue of the journal Nature, which draws upon data collected through 49 separate field experiments around the world.
The research was led by Thomas Crowther, formerly of Yale and now at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, and colleague Mark Bradford at Yale. Scientists from more than 30 institutions across the globe, including PNNL, collaborated on the study.
Soil is a huge reservoir of carbon — more carbon is stored underfoot than in the foliage above. This is especially true in the world’s coldest places, where slow microbial activity has helped keep the carbon locked away.
But the fate of carbon in soil has been an open question for scientists. Many past studies have indicated that as temperatures rise, more carbon will be released from the soil into the air. But other findings suggest that this release of carbon could be balanced by other activity. For instance, plants will thrive more fully in some regions, sucking more carbon dioxide out of the air and into those plants and surrounding soil.
The direction of this exchange — from soil to air, or from air to plants and soil — and the rate are central to our planet’s future. When carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere it acts as a greenhouse gas, warming the planet, but in the soil it has less influence on climate.
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Credits: Ian Roberts via Wikimedia Commons
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