Archive for December, 2011
Monday, December 19th, 2011
From a Nature news article:
The US Department of Energy (DOE) is embarking on a US$100-million research programme … designed to develop a fine-scale model that can simulate how soil microbes, plants and groundwater interact on the scale of centimetres to tens of metres, to control the amount of organic carbon stored underground in ...
Comments Off on DOE launching a big project on Arctic carbon
Saturday, December 17th, 2011
Don't miss this article in the New York Times this morning about Arctic permafrost carbon. It's an excellent summary of a lot of current Arctic carbon research and makes a great case for the relevance of our current Arctic project and the many others like it.
It draws together a lot ...
Comments Off on Major NYT article on Arctic permafrost carbon
Wednesday, December 14th, 2011
There is a cool new study in Nature about changes in the soil microbial community at the time of thaw. Using some cutting edge genomics-based approaches in which they sequenced massive amounts of DNA in frozen and unfrozen soil cores, the authors were able to show that:
...during transition from a frozen ...
2 Comments »
Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
I am attending the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting this week along with about 20,000 other geonerds.
My poster (click to enlarge) is in the Friday morning session (GC51F-1070). On Wednesday afternoon, our whole Alaska project crew will meet and I'm looking forward to putting together all of the different ...
2 Comments »
Friday, December 2nd, 2011
My brother suggested providing some context for the different greenhouse gas sources to help evaluate the potential contribution of Arctic permafrost carbon. Here is the graph from the 2007 IPCC report (click to see it bigger). The white (CO2 from peat) and blue (methane) bands on the bars will get ...
Comments Off on Magnitude of carbon sources
Thursday, December 1st, 2011
A new analysis (paywalled) of the role of permafrost carbon in climate change was published this week in Nature by Ted Schuur and Ben Abbott. They helpfully compiled a lot of what we know and don't know about the issue and made some best estimates based on a survey of experts. ...
2 Comments »