Sentences with phrase «ancient carbon»

Samples of ancient carbon deposits from this era show a marked increase in concentrations of carbon - 12 relative to its heavier isotope carbon - 13, indicating a lot of lighter carbon might have been suddenly released at the time.

Donald Grayson, an anthropologist at the University of Washington, worries that dates from the site might have been contaminated by ancient carbon from the huge aquifer that sits under much of Florida.

A University of Alaska Fairbanks - led research project has provided the first modern evidence of a landscape - level permafrost carbon feedback, in which thawing permafrost releases ancient carbon as climate - warming greenhouse gases.

Scientists have also raised the possibility that global warming could release methane from very large ancient carbon reservoirs such as permafrost and gas hydrates — ice - like forms of methane in the sediments at the bottom of the ocean — that become less stable as temperatures increase.

Washington state is a bit ahead of that curve because ancient carbon stores in the deep ocean are periodically churned up by local currents.

Will it meaningfully limit how much ancient carbon is liberated before the world transitions fully to a non-polluting energy menu?

But ancient carbon sources can easily become contaminated with more recent organic material, making prehistoric sites appear to be much younger than they really are.

The burning of fossil fuels essentially reintroduces ancient carbon that is stored in the depths of the earth back into the carbon cycle.

Reconstructing ancient carbon cycles is really hard to do and once again climate models using the best available proxy data are our best bet.

This pledge is significant because merely draining peatlands is a major source of carbon emissions from peat oxidation as well as ancient carbon carried away as the water table drops.

Burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas, takes ancient carbon that was locked within the Earth and puts it into the atmosphere as CO ₂.

The oceanic flora (viz. seagrasses, seaweed) and the ocean floor itself holds ancient carbon stores.

Then, 200 years ago, humans began burning coal and oil that had been locked away in the sedimentary rocks for more than 100 million years, releasing ancient carbon back into the atmosphere.

He is an organic geochemist with specific expertise in geomicrobiology and palaeoclimate reconstruction, with an emphasis on developing and applying molecular proxies for ancient carbon dioxide concentrations and temperatures.

The permafrost is a vast reservoir of ancient carbon, protected from decay by microorganisms simply by its frozen state: it becomes increasingly vulnerable as the world warms, as humans burn fossil fuels and dump ever greater concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Although climate patterns in the future may not exactly mimic those conditions, the period of warming allowed Petrenko to reveal an important piece of the climate puzzle: natural methane emissions from ancient carbon reservoirs are smaller than researchers previously thought.

Research now shows that Arctic lakes are generally not releasing very much ancient carbon to the atmosphere.

Climate scientist Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and his colleagues think they have found an ancient carbon storehouse big enough to do the job.

The Great Dying of 252 million years ago began, as it does today, with a great burning and release of ancient carbon.

Due to the accumulation of ancient carbon, the eastern tropical Pacific contains some of the oldest waters on earth and more than any other region on earth ventilates tremendous amounts of CO2 from the ocean into the air.

When those stored molecules eventually return to the surface, pH can be lowered due to respiration of ancient carbon, independent of atmospheric CO2.

This ancient carbon is depleted in one of that element's three naturally occurring varieties, or isotopes.