Slash and burn legacy
Nature Geoscience
2012년8월13일
A relict forest biome, once covering a large tract of Brazil, continues to export significant quantities of charred carbon to the ocean each year, reports a study published online this week in Nature Geoscience. On entering the deep ocean, charred carbon remains largely resistant to degradation, and release into the atmosphere, on timescales of centuries to millennia.
Before being destroyed by slash and burn practices, Brazil’s Atlantic Forest was one of the largest tropical forest biomes on Earth. Thorsten Dittmar and colleagues combined historical records of land cover with satellite data to assess the amount of charred carbon generated by the burning of this biome, which started in the sixteenth century and ceased in 1973. They estimate that burning generated 200-500 million tonnes of charred carbon. Measurements from a river draining the region show that significant quantities of this charred carbon continue to be exported to the ocean each year.
doi: 10.1038/ngeo1541
리서치 하이라이트
-
8월18일
Environment: Protecting global forest biodiversityNature
-
8월17일
Climate change: North Atlantic hurricane season starting earlierNature Communications
-
8월17일
Climate change: Energy institutions’ decarbonization scenarios evaluated against the Paris AgreementNature Communications
-
8월16일
Food: Modelling global famine and associated deaths from nuclear weapon detonationNature Food
-
8월12일
Climate change: The Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the worldCommunications Earth & Environment
-
8월11일
Ecology: Forest responses to climate changeNature
