Earth’s oceans, forests and other ecosystems rose to the challenge and doubled the rate by which they soaked up atmospheric carbon in response to the rise in emission levels that the industrial age brought – but it was not enough and it won’t last.

This was the finding of a study by the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration when they analyzed 50 years worth of global carbon dioxide measurements.

Carbon sinks are reservoirs of accumulated and stored carbon. Natural carbon sinks occur when carbon is absorbed and stored by the oceans or by plants. Conventional wisdom is that the rising levels of carbon dioxide that the earth has been seeing as humans hit the industrial age would overwhelm these natural carbon sinks, however, that’s not what the CU-Boulder and N.O.A.A. study found.

The study found that, while carbon dioxide emissions quadrupled, natural carbon sinks doubled their uptake in the past 50 years.

“The good news is that today, nature is helping us out,” said Jim White, a CU-Boulder geological sciences professor who worked on the study.

“The bad news is that none of us think nature is going to keep helping us out indefinitely. When the time comes that these carbon sinks are no longer taking up carbon, there is going to be a big price to pay,” he continued.

Despite the enormous uptake of carbon by the carbon sinks, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has climbed from about 280 parts per million just prior to the Industrial Revolution to about 394 parts per million today and it is expected to reach 400 ppm by 2016.

The study also found that increased variations in the uptake of the carbon sinks from year-to-year and decade-to-decade suggests some instability in the global carbon cycle. For example, they observed decreased carbon dioxide uptake in the 1990s, followed by increased uptake in 2000 to 2010.

“The uptake of carbon dioxide by the oceans and by ecosystems is expected to slow down gradually,” said Pieter Tans, an N.O.A.A. climate researcher. He pointed out that, oceans are already becoming more and more acidic as they absorb more and more carbon, a state of affairs that will eventually cost the oceans their ability to act as carbon sinks.

“As the oceans acidify, we know it becomes harder to stuff even more carbon dioxide into the ocean,” Mr. Tans said. “We just don’t see a letup, globally, yet.”

A paper on the study was published in Nature, with CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher Ashley Ballantyne as lead author. Aside from Mr. White and Mr. Tans, other co-authors were CU-Boulder doctoral student Caroline Alden and N.O.A.A. scientist John Miller.

The study was funded by the National Research Council, the National Science Foundation and N.O.A.A. – K.R. Jalbuena

новинки кинематографа
Машинная вышивка, программа для вышивания, Разработка макета в вышивальной программе, Авторский дизайн