As humans continue to pump the atmosphere with carbon, it’s crucial for scientists to understand how and where the planet absorbs and naturally emits carbon.
By reexamining ocean circulations and considering the carbon-moving power of rivers, the study’s authors suggest that as much as 40 percent of the world’s atmospheric carbon absorbed by land needs to be reallocated from existing estimates. In particular, the Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica and forests in the northern hemisphere — while still substantial absorbers or “sinks” of carbon — may not take up as much as scientists have figured.
“The carbon story we got is more consistent with what people have observed on the ground,” said first author Laure Resplandy, an assistant professor of geosciences and the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University.
“Rivers have been largely overlooked,” Resplandy said. “We need to better constrain the transport of carbon from the land to the ocean by rivers. Otherwise, this carbon is attributed to the land sink and is missing from the ocean sink. If carbon goes into the land or into the ocean, it doesn’t have the same impact.”
Read more at Princeton University
Photo: Dr. Laure Resplandy. CREDIT: Chris Fascenelli, Office of Communications