Tropical Cyclones May Help Against Global Warming
Posted on: Monday, 20 October 2008, 13:40 CDT
Tropical cyclones could offer some help in the fight against global warming by washing large amounts of vegetation and soil containing greenhouse gases into the sea, scientists said on Sunday.“Tropical cyclones could have a significant role in the transfer of atmospheric carbon dioxide to long-term deposits in the deep ocean," according to the findings in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Conducted on the LiWu river in Taiwan, the study suggested that floods caused by typhoon Mindulle in 2004 carried about 0.05 percent of carbon stored in leaves, branches, roots and soil into the Pacific Ocean. The carbon sank to the seabed.
The carbon from these plants usually gets released back to the air when vegetation rots or is burned.
"50 to 90 million tonnes of carbon a year is thought to enter the oceans from islands of the west Pacific alone," mainly during cyclones, according to the scientists, based in Britain and Taiwan.
However, scientists warn that this natural cycle will not have a great impact on global warming forecasts caused by manmade sources .
"The current amount of carbon dioxide building up from manmade sources is about 100-1,000 times faster than this carbon (burial) from the interaction between the cyclones, erosion and forests," said Robert Hilton of Cambridge University who was one of the authors.
"In terms of the manmade carbon cycle this is not going to save us. But it illustrates that the earth has natural ways of dealing with carbon dioxide," he said.
And the scientists said more than half of the carbon might be from fossils in rocks washed down rivers by floods, rather than recent vegetation.
The U.N. Climate Panel predicted last year that tropical cyclones were likely to get more powerful because of global warming that would also cause more heatwaves, droughts, floods and raise world sea levels.
The carbon burial mechanism might fractionally offset the trend to more powerful storms, Hilton said. But more powerful cyclones would have other damaging effects such as washing away more topsoil, threatening farms.
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Journal Nature Geoscience
Source: redOrbit staff
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