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 06 July 2008 03:38 BST

'Super resilient' carbon discovered

Friday, 24 Nov 2006 13:52
Canadian forest found to have 11,000-year-old carbon

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A 'super resilient' form of plant carbon has been discovered by scientists in British Columbia.

The carbon – which is from the first type of plants that re-grew after the last ice age – appears to have been accumulating for 11,000 years in the forests of the Saanich Inlet in Canada.

If the finding is confirmed as typical of other northern forests then the Earth's carbon cycle may have to be re-thought as its modellers worked with the assumption that this type of carbon remains in the soil only 1,000 to 10,000 years before microorganisms return it to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

Writing in the journal Science, lead author Rienk Smittenberg, a research associate with the University of Washington school of oceanography, said: "Our results about the resilience of this particular kind of carbon suggest that the turnover time of this carbon pool may be 10,000 to 100,000 years."

Smittenberg argues that if the findings are true of other forests, then the terrestrial biosphere is likely to be a slow but progressively important atmospheric 'carbon sink' on geological time scales.

The study concludes that its findings could influence current predictions about carbon cycling and soil carbon storage in response to increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.End of story


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