Deserts may be hiding huge carbon sinks

• Autores: Michael Slezak
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3033, 2015, pág. 12
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Irrigation could have locked away more carbon than all the world's plants, and it's somewhere people would never think to look--under the desert. Yan Li of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Urumqi and his team sampled water from a salty aquifer under the Tarim basin--a desert in north-west China--and from a glacier and river that supply it. Using carbon dating, they were able to produce a timeline showing the rate of carbon's arrival in the groundwater over human history. They found that this rate rose dramatically, by more than a factor of 12 over the past 8000 years.