Not so blue anymore: how dead mangroves burden coastal carbon sinks

Mangrove forests have been feeling the pressure of climate change. With heat waves and low rainfall, many mangroves along a 1000 km stretch of coastline in northern Australia have been wiped out. However, the dead trees are living on by contributing large methane emissions which has consequences to global mangrove carbon stores and climate change. Read on to find out how the living dead remain active methane emitters.

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Blue Carbon and Green Kelp: Kelp forests could reduce carbon emissions

Blue carbon is the carbon that is stored within marine ecosystems. It is being used more frequently within global carbon budgets, which are calculated to help us reduce climate change. Historically, only tidal marshes, mangrove forests, and seagrass beds have been used in calculating stored carbon for carbon budgets. A team of researchers from Norway wanted to see if kelp forests could significantly contribute to carbon storage. They studied the kelp forests along Australia’s southern coast and found their storage potential to be similar to that of the other historically used ecosystems. Conserving and restoring kelp forests could therefore increase carbon storage and help reduce climate change.

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Planting Trees for your Next Flight: Studying Behavior Around Carbon Offsetting

Want to fly without the carbon guilt? Offsetting programs let you pay to plant trees to take that carbon from the air, and researchers are studying how social factors and global policies might influence these environmentally-minded behaviors.

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The Noble Sea Sponge and its Role in Global Carbon Cycling

Global cycling of chemicals and nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and silicon (Si) drive one of the most important biological processes on our planet, primary production and the removal of carbon from our atmosphere. What happens when the largest carbon and silicon sink isn’t actually as big as scientists originally thought? Chemical oceanographers Manuel Maldonado and his colleagues have come up with a new way to study the oceans most important chemical cycles and the surprisingly important role of the simple sea sponge.

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Old is Better than Young: The Carbon Sequestration Potential of Letting Forests Mature

“Globally, terrestrial ecosystems currently remove an amount of atmospheric carbon equal to one-third of what humans emit from burning fossil fuels…. Forests are responsible for the largest share of the removal.” (Moomaw et al. 2019). What if we could increase the amount of CO2 forests extract from the air? We can!

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We need to talk about the elephant in the carbon budget

In order to create a carbon budget, we need to identify everything that is taking carbon in and out of the atmosphere. While we have a pretty good idea of the important processes, could we be missing another “big” piece of the puzzle? In this study, scientists try to figure out if elephants are having an impact on the carbon cycle where they live.

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Computer models suggest how COVID-19 may disrupt warming oceans

COVID-19 has disrupted much of life as we know it – and the environment is no different. While we may not know the full impact until many years later, scientists suspect that the sudden, drastic decrease in fossil fuel use, especially air travel, will appear as some disruption to our seemingly unstoppable climb in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. The primary way humans can slow global warming is to decrease our use of fossil fuels. What would such a world look like? Scientists hope to build models in order to learn and make better predictions from this unexpected experiment.

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