and contain a vast amount of carbon primarily in the soil Kelly said. There is more carbon in the boreal forests than in the atmosphere he said.
And one of the main ways that the carbon that's accumulated over thousands of years gets out of the soil is through burning.
The release of this carbon from fires adds to the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere potentially leading to additional climate warming he said.
The Yukon Flats region appears to be undergoing a transition that is unprecedented in the Holocene epoch Hu said.
Loss of trees could impact on climate change as forests store carbon in their stems
Land use in Africa influences how much its forests can grow--and their capacity for absorbing carbon emissions.
and help to limit the impact of carbon emissions but instead in many places people are impacting more on woodlands
and forests adding to carbon emissions. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of Edinburgh.
The carbon emissions generated by a search on Google or a post on Facebook are related mostly to three things:
and how much of the center's electricity comes from renewable or low-carbon sources. Adding renewable power to the mix can help reduce a data center's overall emissions by 98 percent
Of these three improving the efficiency of the IT devices is overwhelmingly the most important said Jonathan Koomey a co-author of the study Characteristics of Low-Carbon Data centers published online June 25 in Nature Climate Change.
and in many of the countries where they operate carbon emissions have a cost or soon will.
and are responsible for about 0. 5 percent of carbon emissions. And the Internet overall is reducing greenhouse gas emissions
So high-energy data centers that pay their utilities a premium for renewable power unnecessarily tie up low-carbon electrons that might otherwise be used to reduce emissions from other customers.
One carbon atom latches onto the seed in a process called nucleation and others follow to form the familiar chicken-wire grid.
The edge lets carbon atoms get under the graphene skin where they start a new sheet.
But because the top graphene grows so fast it eventually halts the flow of carbon atoms to the new sheet underneath.
The mechanism relies on that top layer to stop carbon from reaching the bottom so easily Tour said.
The Tour lab pioneered the bulk manufacture of single-atom-thick graphene nanoribbons in 2009 with the discovery that carbon nanotubes could be unzipped chemically into long thin sheets.
versus carbon and get entirely new structures. This is dramatically different from regular graphene. Graduate student Zheng Yan a member of Tour's lab and lead author of the paper discovered the new route to nanoribbons
Rainforests that previously contained lots of big old trees which store carbon and support a diverse ecosystem are being replaced with oil palm or timber plantations or hollowed out by logging.
The research is based on stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of 124 crop samples of barley wheat lentil and peas totalling around 2500 grains or seeds.
#Broadband photodetector for polarized lightusing carpets of aligned carbon nanotubes researchers from Rice university and Sandia National Laboratories have created a solid-state electronic device that is hardwired to detect polarized light across a broad swath of the visible and infrared spectrum.
In February Kono L onard and colleagues described a new method for making photodetectors from carpets of carbon nanotubes--long narrow tubes of pure carbon that are about as wide as a strand of DNA.
If they become more efficient at using water they should be able to take more carbon out of the atmosphere due to higher growth rates.
When Keenan Richardson and colleagues began to examine those records they found that forests were storing more carbon
#Not-weak knots bolster carbon fiberlarge flakes of graphene oxide are the essential ingredient in a new recipe for robust carbon fiber created at Rice university.
The material could be used to increase the strength of many products that use carbon fiber like composites for strong light aircraft or fabrics for bulletproof apparel according to the researchers.
That never happens in a carbon fiber or polymer fibers. Credit goes to the unique properties of graphene oxide flakes created in an environmentally friendly process patented by Rice a few years ago.
But they're massive compared with the petroleum-based pitch used in current carbon fiber.
Tour said industrial carbon fibers--a source of steel-like strength in ultralight materials ranging from baseball bats to bicycles to bombers--haven't improved much in decades
But the new carbon fibers spun at room temperature at Rice already show impressive tensile strength and modulus and have the potential to be even stronger when annealed at higher temperatures.
Heating the fibers to about 2100 degrees Celsius the industry standard for making carbon fiber will likely eliminate the knotting strength Xiang said
and surface water quality handling floodwater preventing erosion and storing carbon). They focused on the Yahara River watershed
flood regulation pasture and freshwater supply all went together as did forest recreation soil retention carbon storage and surface water quality.
By measuring radioactive carbon-14 deposited in tusks and teeth by open-air nuclear bomb tests the method reveals the year an animal died
which is shaped a graph roughly like an inverted V--showing changes in carbon-14 levels in the atmosphere
The carbon-14 was formed in the atmosphere by U s. and Soviet atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in Nevada and Siberia from 1952 through 1962.
How the Study Was Performedneutrons from the nuclear tests bombarded nitrogen--the atmosphere's most common gas--to turn some of it into carbon-14.
and animal carbon-14 levels followed by a steady decline ever since. The method in the study is a bit like telling a tree's age by its rings but instead of counting rings Cerling Uno and colleagues measured carbon-14 levels at various points along the lengths of elephants'and hippos'tusks
and teeth. The conventional way of measuring carbon-14 is to wait for and count when the isotope decays radioactively.
In the study the researchers used accelerator mass spectrometry or AMS which requires 1000 times less material for analysis--a big advantage
which sputters off carbon atoms so the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 can be measured.
and from Misha an African elephant euthanized in 2008 due to declining health at Utah's Hogle Zoo in Salt lake city. The analysis revealed that various tissues that formed at the same time have the same carbon-14 levels
By determining carbon-14 in these samples of known dates the researchers now can measure carbon-14 levels in other ivory to determine its age within about a year.
The four oldest samples--from animals died between 1905 and 1953--had minimal carbon-14
So the test can identify pre-1955 ivory by its low pre-nuclear-test levels of carbon-14.
It takes about 5700 years for half of carbon-14 to decay radioactively. But the amount in Earth's atmosphere after the 1950s and 1960s bomb tests faded much more quickly
because oceans and trees absorb carbon dioxide--including carbon-14--from the atmosphere. So the method won't work for tusks
or other tissues that grow after about 15 years from now when atmospheric carbon-14 returns to pre-bomb levels.
what prehistoric and modern animals ate over time especially when combined with existing isotope analysis of ratios of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in teeth--data that reveal
If trees do fail to regenerate it could further reduce ecosystem carbon storage and amplify the greenhouse effect the study said.
#Farming carbon: Study reveals potent carbon-storage potential of human-made wetlandsafter being drained by the millions of acres to make way for agriculture wetlands are staging a small comeback these days on farms.
Some farmers restore or construct wetlands alongside their fields to trap nitrogen and phosphorus runoff and research shows these systems can also retain pesticides antibiotics and other agricultural pollutants.
and co-author Blanca Bernal report that two 15-year-old constructed marshes in Ohio accumulated soil carbon at an average annual rate of 2150 pounds per acre--or just over one ton of carbon per acre
and 26%faster than the two were adding soil carbon five years ago. And by year 15 each wetland had a soil carbon pool of more than 30000 pounds per acre an amount equaling
or exceeding the carbon stored by forests and farmlands. What this suggests Mitsch says is that researchers
and land managers shouldn't ignore restored and human-made wetlands as they look for places to store
or sequester carbon long-term. For more than a decade for example scientists have been studying the potential of no-tillage planting of pastures and other farm practices to store carbon in agricultural lands
which cover roughly one-third of Earth's land area. Yet when created wetlands are discussed in agricultural circles it's almost always in the context of water quality.
let's add carbon to the list Mitsch says. If you happen to build a wetland to remove nitrogen for example then once you have it it's probably accumulating carbon too.
In fact wetlands in agricultural landscapes may sequester carbon very quickly because high-nutrient conditions promote the growth of cattail reeds
and other wetland big boys that produce a lot of plant biomass and carbon Mitsch says. Once carbon ends up in wetland soil it can also remain there for hundreds to thousands of years because of waterlogged conditions that inhibit microbial decomposition.
And carbon is a big deal--any carbon sinks that we find we should be protecting Mitsch says.
Then we're going even further by saying: We've lost half of our wetlands in the United states
so let's not only protect the wetlands we have remaining but also build some more. At the same time he acknowledges that wetlands emit the powerful greenhouse gas (GHG) methane leading some to argue that wetlands shouldn't be created as a means to sequester carbon
and mitigate climate change. But in a new analysis that modeled carbon fluxes over 100 years from the two constructed Ohio marshes
and 19 other wetlands worldwide Mitsch Bernal and others demonstrated that most wetlands are net carbon sinks even
when methane emissions are factored in. And among the best sinks were the wetlands in Ohio possibly due to flow-through conditions that promoted rapid carbon storage
while minimizing methane losses the authors hypothesize. The concerns about methane emissions and even his own promising findings point to something else Mitsch cautions:
And now we're seeing that they're very important for retaining carbon. So they're multidimensional systems
study showsa new study shows that the predator-prey relationship can affect the flow of carbon through an ecosystem.
This previously unmeasured influence on the environment may offer a new way of looking at biodiversity management and carbon storage for climate change.
and spiders--herbivores and predators in the study's food chain--and how it affects the movement of carbon through a grassland ecosystem.
Carbon the basic building block of all organic tissue moves through the food chain at varying speeds depending on
The researchers manipulated the food chains of grassland ecosystem to see how the levels of carbon would change over time.
which allowed the team to track the carbon levels by periodically taking leaf root and dead animal samples.
The study found that the presence of spiders drove up the rate of carbon uptake by the plants by about 1. 4 times more than
It was revealed also that the pattern of carbon storage in the plants changed when both herbivores and carnivores were present.
At the same time the grasses stored more carbon in their roots in a response to being disturbed at low levels
In cases where only herbivores were present the plants stored less carbon overall likely due to the more intense eating habits of the herbivores that put pressure on plants to reduce their storage
and breathe out carbon more. These stress impacts then caused both the plants and the herbivores to change their behaviors and change the composition of their local environment.
-and-prey dynamics that drive the carbon cycle and so protecting lands and storing carbon could be linked at the same time.
It's going to force some thinking about the vital roles of animals in regulating carbon concludes Dr. Schmitz pointing to the fact that the UN's body of scientific experts who study climate change don't consider these multiplier effects in their models.
#Unzipped nanotubes unlock potential for batteriesresearchers at Rice university have come up with a new way to boost the efficiency of the ubiquitous lithium ion (LI) battery by employing ribbons of graphene that start as carbon nanotubes.
what we're doing here in the Arctic into perspective said Miller principal investigator of the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) a five-year NASA-led field campaign studying how climate change is affecting the Arctic's carbon cycle.
and animals from decomposing so each year another layer gets added to the reservoirs of organic carbon sequestered just beneath the topsoil.
Over hundreds of millennia Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon--an estimated 1400 to 1850 petagrams of it (a petagram is 2. 2 trillion pounds or 1 billion metric tons.
That's about half of all the estimated organic carbon stored in Earth's soils. In comparison about 350 petagrams of carbon have been emitted from all fossil-fuel combustion and human activities since 1850.
Most of this carbon is located in thaw-vulnerable topsoils within 10 feet (3 meters) of the surface.
But as scientists are learning permafrost --and its stored carbon--may not be as permanent as its name implies.
And that has concerned them. Permafrost soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures--as much as 2. 7 to 4. 5 degrees Fahrenheit (1. 5 to 2. 5 degrees Celsius) in just the past 30 years
As heat from Earth's surface penetrates into permafrost it threatens to mobilize these organic carbon reservoirs
and release them into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane upsetting the Arctic's carbon balance and greatly exacerbating global warming.
Scientists want to know how much permafrost carbon may be vulnerable to release as Earth's climate warms
and thawing permafrost are having on Arctic carbon emissions. CARVE is testing hypotheses that Arctic carbon reservoirs are vulnerable to climate warming
while delivering the first direct measurements and detailed regional maps of Arctic carbon dioxide and methane sources and demonstrating new remote sensing and modeling capabilities.
and accurate climate models to know with confidence how the balance of carbon among living things will respond to climate change
CARVE shows you need to fly very close to the surface in the Arctic to capture the interesting exchanges of carbon taking place between Earth's surface
This instrument is an airborne simulator for NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) mission to be launched in 2014.
and Alpine Research Stable Isotope Laboratory and Radiocarbon Laboratory in Boulder for analyses to determine the carbon's sources
Historically the cold wet soils of Arctic ecosystems have stored more carbon than they have released. If climate change causes the Arctic to get warmer and drier scientists expect most of the carbon to be released as carbon dioxide.
If it gets warmer and wetter most will be in the form of methane. The distinction is critical.
If just one percent of the permafrost carbon released over a short time period is methane it will have the same greenhouse impact as the 99 percent that is released as carbon dioxide.
and whether high northern latitude regions generate or store carbon. CARVE is also studying wildfire impacts on the Arctic's carbon cycle.
Fires in boreal forests or tundra accelerate the thawing of permafrost and carbon release. Detailed fire observation records since 1942 show the average annual number of Alaska wildfires has increased
CARVE's simultaneous measurements of greenhouse gases will help quantify how much carbon is released to the atmosphere from fires in Alaska--a crucial and uncertain element of its carbon budget.
I have been trying for several decades to understand how a simple gas--two carbons and four hydrogens--can cause such profound changes in a plant Ecker says.
Logging may have greater impact on carbon emissions than previously thoughtusing wood for energy is considered cleaner than fossil fuels
but a Dartmouth College-led study finds that logging may release large amounts of carbon stored in deep forest soils.
Global atmospheric studies often don't consider carbon in deep (or mineral) soil because it is thought to be stable
But the Dartmouth findings show deep soil can play an important role in carbon emissions in clear-cutting and other intensive forest management practices.
and that forest carbon analyses are incomplete unless they include deep soil which stores more than 50 percent of the carbon in forest soils.
Our paper suggests the carbon in the mineral soil may change more rapidly and result in increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide as a result of disturbances such as logging said Dartmouth Professor Andrew Friedland a co-author.
Our paper suggests that increased reliance on wood may have unintended the effect of increasing the transfer of carbon from the mineral soil to the atmosphere.
So the intended goal of reducing carbon in the atmosphere may not be met. The federal government is looking to wood wind solar hydropower
and other renewable energy sources to address concerns about climate change and energy security. Woody biomass which includes trees grown on plantations managed natural forests
Mineral soil carbon responses can vary highly depending on harvesting intensity surface disturbance and soil type.
and understanding forest carbon cycles requires an in depth analysis of the storage in and fluxes among different forest carbon pools
and biomass harvesting on elemental cycling processes in high-elevation forests in the Northeastern United states. He considers many elements including carbon trace elements such as lead and major elements such as nitrogen and calcium.
and carbon atoms would bind. We're working on it he said. We would like to stick graphene
#Roman seawater concrete holds the secret to cutting carbon emissionsthe chemical secrets of a concrete Roman breakwater that has spent the last 2000 years submerged in the Mediterranean sea have been uncovered by an international team of researchers led by Paulo Monteiro of the U s
But making it releases carbon from burning fuel needed to heat a mix of limestone and clays to 1450 degrees Celsius (2642 degrees Fahrenheit)--and from the heated limestone (calcium carbonate) itself.
and less release of carbon into the atmosphere may be the legacy of a deeper understanding of how the Romans made their incomparable concrete.
In four new studies of carbon isotopes in fossilized tooth enamel from scores of human ancestors and baboons in Africa from 4 million to 10000 years ago a team of two dozen researchers found a surprise
What You Eatthe new studies analyze carbon isotope results from 173 teeth from 11 species of hominins.
but the new studies include new carbon-isotope results for 104 teeth from 91 individuals of eight hominin species. Those teeth are in African museums
The method of determining ancient creatures'diets from carbon isotope data is less than 20 years old
The powder was placed in a mass spectrometer to learn ratios of carbon isotopes incorporated into tooth enamel via diet.
The ratios of rare carbon-13 to common carbon-12 reveal whether an animal ate plants that used so-called C3 C4
Animals eating C4 and CAM plants have enriched amounts of carbon-13. C3 plants include trees bushes and shrubs and their leaves and fruits;
Graphene consists of a single atomic layer of carbon arranged in a honeycomb lattice. Our first Science paper in 2008 studied the strength graphene can achieve
In its perfect crystalline form graphene (a one-atom-thick carbon layer) is the strongest material ever measured as the Columbia Engineering team reported in Science in 2008--so strong that as Hone observed it would take an elephant balanced on a pencil to break through a sheet
or ultrastrong composites that could replace carbon fiber. Or the researchers speculate a science fiction idea of a space elevator that could connect an orbiting satellite to Earth by a long cord that might consist of sheets of CVD graphene
since graphene (and its cousin material carbon nanotubes) is the only material with the high strength-to-weight ratio required for this kind of hypothetical application.
#Dairys carbon footprint: Flatulence tops the listresearchers at the University of Arkansas are attempting to help the U s. dairy industry decrease its carbon footprint as concentrations of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere reach record levels.
In 2007 Americans consumed approximately 17.4 million metric tons of fluid milk--milk consumed as a drink
Their study was published as a special issue Carbon and Water Footprint of U s. Milk From Farm to Table of the International Dairy Journal in April.
#Land-based carbon offsets: False hope? Forest and soil carbon is important, but does not offset fossil fuel emissionsleading world climate change experts have thrown cold water on the idea that planting trees can offset carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.
Professor Brendan Mackey of Griffith University Climate Change Response Program is the lead author of an international study involving researchers from Australia
and the U k. Their findings are reported in Untangling the confusion around land carbon science and climate change mitigation policy published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.
and internationally assume that fossil fuel emissions can be offset through sequestering carbon by planting trees and other land management practices.
There is a danger in believing that land carbon sinks can solve the problem of atmospheric carbon emissions
of emerging low-carbon technologies which have yet to be proven. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by American Chemical Society.
of emerging low-carbon technologies which have yet to be proven. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by American Chemical Society.
The one-atom-thick form of carbon can act as a go-between that allows vertically aligned carbon nanotubes to grow on nearly anything.
when graphene is used as a middleman surfaces considered unusable as substrates for carbon nanotube growth now have the potential to do so.
The same could be said of carbon nanotubes which are basically rolled-up tubes of graphene. A vertically aligned forest of carbon nanotubes grown on diamond would disperse heat like a traditional heat sink but with millions of fins.
Such an ultrathin array could save space in small microprocessor-based devices. Further work along these lines could produce such structures as patterned nanotube arrays on diamond that could be utilized in electronic devices Ajayan said.
carbon and timbermore than 13000 ships per year carrying more than 284 million tons of cargo transit the Panama canal each year generating roughly $1. 8 billion dollars in toll fees for the Panama canal Authority.
dry-season water flows carbon sequestration timber and livestock production. Published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) their study--Bundling ecosystem services in the Panama canal Watershed--examines precipitation topography vegetation
but does increase carbon sequestration and timber production said Simonit. Our research provides an insight into the importance of understanding the spatial distribution of the costs and benefits of jointly produced services.
Both natural forest and teak plantations offer benefits in the form of carbon sequestration and timber products among other things and these should be weighed against any water losses said Perrings.
According to their study water losses from natural forest regeneration would be compensated by the value of carbon sequestration in 59.6 percent of the converted area at current carbon prices.
On the other hand reforestation of existing grassland with teak (under sustainable forest management) would generate gains sufficient to offset the hydrological losses in all converted areas regardless of the value of carbon.
Graphene a single sheet of carbon atoms is the thinnest electrical conductor we know. With the addition of the monolayer molybdenum disulfide and other metal dichalcogenides we have all the building blocks for modern electronics that must be created in atomically thin form.
#Footwears (carbon) footprint: Bulk of shoes carbon footprint comes from manufacturing processesa typical pair of running shoes generates 30 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to keeping a 100-watt light bulb on for one week according to a new
MIT-led lifecycle assessment. But what's surprising to researchers isn't the size of a shoe's carbon footprint
but where the majority of that footprint comes from. The researchers found that more than two-thirds of a running shoe's carbon impact can come from manufacturing processes with a smaller percentage arising from acquiring
or extracting raw materials. This breakdown is expected for more complex products such as electronics where the energy that goes into manufacturing fine integrated circuits can outweigh the energy expended in processing raw materials.
The group found that much of the carbon impact came from powering manufacturing plants: A significant portion of the world's shoe manufacturers are located in China where coal is the dominant source of electricity.
--and therefore carbon-intensive--compared with the energy that goes into making shoe materials such as polyester and polyurethane.
and reduce shoes'carbon footprint. He adds that the findings may also help industries assess the carbon impact of similar consumer products more efficiently.
Understanding environmental footprint is resource intensive. The key is need you to put your analytical effort into the areas that matter Kirchain says.
These last three stages they found contributed very little to the product's carbon footprint.
If we were looking at a leather shoe it would be much more materials-driven because of the carbon intensity of leather production.
An improved designin tallying the carbon emissions from every part of a running shoe's lifecycle the researchers were also able to spot places where reductions might be made.
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