Esri News Feed

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Cool Geo-Pic: Southern Ocean Carbon Sink

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This is an interesting consequence of weather - low carbon absorbtion. As weather patterns may increase to extremes with global climate change - recalcs to absorbtion rates seem re need "rethinking".

Cut & Paste Highlights:

" ... As people have put more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the ocean has responded by soaking up more carbon dioxide—a trend scientists expected to continue for many years. But in 2007, a team of scientists reported in the journal Science that between 1981 and 2004 carbon dioxide concentrations in the Southern Ocean didn’t change at all, even though global atmospheric levels continued to rise. This graph shows the changes scientists expected to see (blue line) compared to their estimate of actual carbon dioxide absorption (red line). The results suggested that the Southern Ocean was no longer keeping pace with human carbon dioxide emissions."

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