Mackenzie / Lerman Carbon in the Geobiosphere

- Earth's Outer Shell -
2006
ISBN: 978-1-4020-4238-6
Verlag: Springer Netherland
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 25, 413 Seiten, eBook

Reihe: Topics in Geobiology

Carbon and carbon dioxide always played an important role in the geobiosphere that is part of the Earth’s outer shell and surface environment. The book’s eleven chapters cover the fundamentals of the biogeochemical behavior of carbon near the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, minerals, waters, air-sea exchange, and inorganic and biological processes fractionating the carbon isotopes, and its role in the evolution of inorganic and biogenic sediments, ocean water, the coupling to nutrient nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and the future of the carbon cycle in the Anthropocene.This book is mainly a reference text for Earth and environmental scientists; it presents an overview of the origins and behavior of the carbon cycle and atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the human effects on them. The book can also be used for a one-semester course at an intermediate to advanced level addressing the behavior of the carbon and related cycles.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mackenzie, Fred T.

Lerman, Abraham

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Brief Overview of Carbon on Earth.- Earth’s Volatile Beginnings.- Heat Balance of the Atmosphere and Carbon Dioxide.- Mineralogy, Chemistry, and Reaction Kinetics of the Major Carbonate Phases.- Carbon Dioxide in Natural Waters.- Isotopic Fractionation of Carbon: Inorganic and Biological Processes.- Sedimentary Rock Record and Oceanic and Atmospheric Carbon.- Weathering and Consumption of CO2.- Carbon in the Oceanic Coastal Margin.- Natural Global Carbon Cycle through Time.- The Carbon Cycle in the Anthropocene.

Leseproben

Chapter 1 Brief Overview of Carbon on Earth (p. 1)

In the minds of the broad public, carbon dioxide is associated primarily, if not exclusively, with considerations of global warming. This topic has been the focus of undoubtedly great attention in the last decades of the 20th and in the early 21st century owing to the coverage of the subject of global warming and climate change by the news media drawing their information from the results of scientific studies.

The role of carbon dioxide as one of the gases that warm the Earth’s atmosphere by absorption of infrared or longwave, outgoing Earth radiation has been known since the work of the French scientist Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier in the early nineteenth century and that of the Irish polymath John Tyndall in the middle part of that century.

The similar role of water vapor as a greenhouse gas was also recognized by John Tyndall in 1863. In his studies of the riddle of the causes of the ice ages, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in the mid-1890s did a series of mathematical calculations and showed that if the amount of atmospheric CO2 were cut in half, the world would be 4 to 5C cooler.

He also concluded that a doubling of the CO2 concentration would lead to a 5 to 6C increase in global mean temperature. Furthermore, he recognized the fact that the burning of coal and oil emits CO2 to the atmosphere and could lead to warming of the planet because of human activities (Chapter 3).

However, it was only an increase in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured systematically by Charles D. Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California since the mid-1950s in the air over the mountain Mauna Loa on the Island of Hawaii, that drew widespread attention to this gas as a product of fossil-fuel burning and land-use changes by the increasingly industrializing world.

In this first chapter of the book we describe the structure of the Outer Shell of the Earth on a global scale, the chemical composition of some of its parts on an atomic scale, the essentials of the carbon cycle in modern time, the connections between the inorganic and biological processes within the carbon cycle, and the estimated occurrences of the main types of fossil fuels that are believed to be the major source of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide in the industrial age of the last 150 years.

This material provides an overview of the global carbon cycle and the framework for discussion of various aspects of the cycle in the chapters that follow. In the concerns about global warming and the shorter-term increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide, three facts are nearly forgotten: one is the long-term cooling of the Earth’s surface in the last 30 million years, since ice cover began to develop in Antarctica, another is the periodic glaciations during the last 1 million years that were accompanied by rises and declines in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, and the third is the primary importance of carbon dioxide to plant growth.

The long history of carbon on Earth begins with the Earth’s accretion 4.55 billion years ago (Fig. 1.1) and it underlies not only the beginning and evolution of organic life on Earth, but also a great variety of the processes that have shaped the geological environment since the early days of the planet.