Carbon

Environment
Nitrogen Falling From the Sky Changes What Forests Breathe Out
A forest does not only take carbon in. On a warm afternoon it hands some straight back, as a thin chemical breath of isoprene, monoterpenes and heavier molecules, the family of compounds that gives a…
By Andreja Jezernik3 days ago3 min read
Environment
Fresh Carbon Grown in a Jar Reads Four Centuries Too Old
For two years, a sealed culture of marine microbes fed itself in a Chinese laboratory: a cyanobacterium and the bacteria that live alongside it, recycling their own nutrients, with nothing added and…
By Oli Kotyk3 days ago3 min read
Environment
Wood Could Store More Carbon in the World's New Buildings Than Biochar Concrete
A concrete frame is a debt in climate accounting. The cement in it released carbon dioxide on the way to becoming cement, and nothing the finished wall does afterward pays that back. A timber frame…
By Andreja Jezernik5 days ago4 min read
Environment
How a Hot Year or a Volcano Can Reset the Climate's Political Clock
The physics of climate change runs on decades and centuries. Politics runs on the last hot summer. A new modeling study asks what happens when you wire the two together and let the short clock start…
By Oli Kotyk1w ago3 min read
Environment
How an Invasive Beaver Turns a Sub-Antarctic Forest Into a Methane Source
At the bottom of the world, on the islands of the Fuegian Archipelago, a rodent from another hemisphere has been reshaping the forest for the better part of a century. The North American beaver was…
By Andreja Jezernik1w ago5 min read
Environment
The Arctic's Coldest Months Are Becoming Its Biggest Carbon Problem
For most of the year the far North does its climate work in the dark. Long after the growing season ends and the last flux of summer photosynthesis fades, the soil beneath the snow keeps breathing:…
By Oli Kotyk3w ago4 min read
Environment
The Aral Sea's Dry Bed Turned Into a Carbon Bomb. Rewetting It Could Defuse the Rest
For decades the Aral Sea has stood as a monument to what human engineering can undo. Once the fourth-largest lake on Earth, it began shrinking in the 1960s when Soviet planners diverted the rivers…
By Andreja Jezernik3w ago4 min read
Environment
The Seafloor Vault: Once Permafrost Carbon Settles Into Arctic Nearshore Mud, Less Than a Tenth of It Is Breathed Back Out
Qikiqtaruk is a small, treeless island off the Yukon coast, and every summer it gets smaller. Waves undercut its ice-rich bluffs, thawed ground slumps, and slabs of Pleistocene permafrost drop into…
By Oli Kotyk4w ago5 min read

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Carbon

Nitrogen Falling From the Sky Changes What Forests Breathe Out

Fresh Carbon Grown in a Jar Reads Four Centuries Too Old

Wood Could Store More Carbon in the World's New Buildings Than Biochar Concrete

How a Hot Year or a Volcano Can Reset the Climate's Political Clock

How an Invasive Beaver Turns a Sub-Antarctic Forest Into a Methane Source

The Arctic's Coldest Months Are Becoming Its Biggest Carbon Problem

The Aral Sea's Dry Bed Turned Into a Carbon Bomb. Rewetting It Could Defuse the Rest

The Seafloor Vault: Once Permafrost Carbon Settles Into Arctic Nearshore Mud, Less Than a Tenth of It Is Breathed Back Out