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Nutrient Cycles
• The basic elements of which all organisms are composed
are carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, oxygen, and
hydrogen.
• The first four of these elements are much more limited in
mass and easier to trace than are oxygen and hydrogen.
• Because these elements are conserved, they can be
recycled indefinitely.
• Because the pathways used to describe the movement of
these elements in the environment are cyclic, they are
referred to as the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and
sulfur cycles.
CARBON CYCLE
• What are the major reservoirs of carbon on earth, how
large are these?
• What are the major fluxes of carbon on earth, which
ones predominate? At what timescales?
• What are the main ways that carbon is cycled?
• What are the preindustrial, modern, and projected future
concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere?
• What is the "missing sink" and why is it important?
• What are the important controls on fluxes of carbon
between reservoirs?
Introduction
• Understanding the carbon cycle is the first step toward understanding
possible impacts of the human-induced rise in greenhouse gasses.
• Carbon is the elemental building block of all life and as such, it is
stored and exchanged between different reservoirs, each of which
has its own characteristic size and response time.
• The main carbon reservoirs are carbonate rocks (limestone), soils,
land plants, the oceans, the atmosphere.
• The aim of this lecture is to give you an appreciation for how large the
carbon reservoirs are, what the important fluxes of carbon are
between reservoirs, how we conduct mass balances between the
reservoirs, and finally to underscore the magnitude of anthropogenic
CO2 increases relative to these reservoirs and fluxes.
• Through fossil fuel burning and land use
changes, humans have started a grand,
uncontrolled experiment with carbon on earth.
• We now recognize that this experiment will
change our climate, and the potential effects on
people's lives have stimulated some of the largest
public and policy debates of any scientific topic
today.
• There have been times on earth in the past when the CO2
concentration of the atmosphere has been both much less
and much greater than it is today.
• If it has been greater, then one might ask "why are we so
worried, the CO2 concentrations were greater than they
are today and we still survived?"
• The answer to that question lies in the fact that the rate of
change of CO2 in the atmosphere is faster today than at
anytime in earth's history.
• It is this rapid increase in CO2, not necessary the final
CO2 concentration that we may achieve, which is driving
much of our concern.
• For example, because organisms (and certainly all of the human
cultures on earth) have never been exposed to such rapid rates of
CO2 increase, we don't know how they will respond and whether they
will be able to adapt quickly enough to survive.
• These are the questions that science and society are struggling with
today.
• While we know that CO2 concentrations are increasing, there have
been several plans or ideas on how to control them "naturally", such
as plant more trees to take up the excess CO2.
• Later in the lecture we will examine two of these ideas and determine
if they could be real solutions to global warming.
The ins and outs of carbon -
reservoirs and fluxes.
• The basic principles of accounting as applied to understand how
carbon cycles through all the various reservoirs.
• One of the key things we learn from this exercise is that there are
"fast" and "slow" carbon cycles.
• Rapid carbon cycling occurs on timescales of days to seasons to
yearly timescales and is accomplished by the cycling of land and
ocean life on the planet: Photosynthesis and respiration and
remineralization.
• Changes in ocean carbon uptake and storage occur over timescales
on many decades to many millennia.
• Even slower carbon cycling occurs over much longer timescales
(millions of years) and involves the long-term processes of rock
formation and weathering, as well as tectonic activity at the Earth's
surface.
• There are several different forms of carbon that we have
to keep track of in learning about the carbon cycle.
• The main forms are:
(a) Inorganic-C in rocks (such as limestone, CaCO3);
(b) organic-C (such as found in organic plant material and
soils); carbon gases such as CO2, (carbon dioxide),
CH4, (methane), and CO (carbon monoxide).
• "Carbon cycling" is really the movement of C from one of
these forms to another form.
• An example would the plant growth, which takes carbon
from the atmosphere reservoir and "fixes" it as plant-
based carbon (leaves).
• The fundamental unit of measurement of Carbon
at planetary cycling scales is the Gigaton.
• One gigaton is equal to one billion tons of carbon
(or 10^15 g).
• How much is one gigaton?
• It is about 2750 Empire State Buildings, or about
142 million African elephants.
• For reference, The US carbon emission rate
alone is about 1.4 gigtons per year (or about 5.4
tons/person annually).
• Table 1: Sizes (in gigatons, or 1015 g) of the main reservoirs of carbon
on earth.