(ORDO NEWS) — Climate change no longer seems like a far-fetched problem to us. Scientists continue to study this process to understand how to slow it down.
This landscape is responsible for regulating the levels of carbon dioxide in our planet’s atmosphere.
Scientists have known for years that silicate minerals react with CO2 and water to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and act as a thermostat to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from rising for billions of years.
But how sensitive is this thermostat? To find out, scientists need to expand laboratory measurements to match reality.
However, until now it has not been possible to reconcile laboratory measurements with real measurements made in soils and rivers.
This gap in our understanding hinders modeling efforts on Earth‘s long-term carbon cycle and climate, making it difficult to accurately predict how effective silicate weathering, both natural and man-made, will be at removing CO2 from our atmosphere.
What influences climate change?
Professor Susan Brantley and her team at Pennsylvania State University have found a way to quantify the effect of the silicate weathering reaction on temperature consistently at all scales, from laboratory and real measurements to the entire Earth.
In doing so, they identified the type of landscape that has the greatest impact on the Earth’s thermostat.
The researchers found that weathering was more related to temperature in real landscape conditions than in the lab.
This is partly due to the consequences of the destruction of minerals as they move down in the rock and in similar processes.
But when you look at the world as a whole, it is surprisingly less sensitive to temperature than in a laboratory.
The authors of the new work determined that this is due to the fact that only about 12 percent of the land – mountainous and rainy areas – is subject to weathering, which is very sensitive to temperature changes.
Weather conditions in other territories are rather indifferent to the climate. Thus, a relatively small part of the Earth controls the Earth’s climate thermostat for millions of years.
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