US Forests

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=us-forests-soak-up-carbon-dioxide

U.S. Forests Soak Up Carbon Dioxide, but for How Long?

Forests play a key role in offsetting U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases, but that ability may shrink as the climate changes

By Douglas Fischer and The Daily Climate October 18, 2010

The findings, released last week, estimate the nation's expanding forests sequester an additional 192 million metric tons of carbon annually due to increases in both the total area of forest land and the amount of carbon stored per acre.

That's the equivalent of removing about half the cars on the roads nationwide, or almost 135 million vehicles.

Ocean Biological Carbon Pump

The Biological Carbon Pump

http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange1/06_2.shtml

How important is the biological pump overall? It turns out, it is very important. For instance, if the biological pump were turned off, atmospheric CO₂ would rise to about 550 ppm (compared to the current 360 ppm). If the pump were operating at maximum capacity (that is, if all the ocean’s nutrients were used up) atmospheric CO₂ would drop to a low of 140 ppm.

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Interesting estimate by the University of California, San Diego.

http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange1/06_3.shtml

The Marine Carbon Cycle

Altering this ratio of carbon atoms can be done, for example, by changing the amount of silicate (SiO₄) in seawater. If there is plenty of silicate, marine organisms called “diatoms” will grow more happily. They fix carbon into organic matter, and they take much of it down to deep waters because many diatoms, at the end of their life cycle, tend to settle out of the water where they grew. If there is very little silicate available, organisms called “coccolithophores” grow more readily than diatoms.

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Let us remember at least one element concerning the carbonate cycle: Unusually intense blooms of carbonate-fixing plankton, like coccolithophores, would have the effect of bringing carbon dioxide from surface waters to the air above it – that is, increasing the atmospheric CO₂ concentration. The same is true for coral and shell growth in shallow waters. We would like to know, then, what precisely causes the blooms of coccolithophores that can be seen on satellite surveys, and whether their intensity is increasing or decreasing as the planet warms. Unfortunately, this is not known at present.

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During the overall cooling of the planet, in the last 40 million years, more and more silicate has been removed from ocean in the upwelling regions around the continents (due to stronger mixing from stronger winds). We know this because radiolarians (plankton organisms using silicate to make their skeletons) have been getting thinner and more delicate through time. In the last 3 million years this process of silicate extraction has enormously accelerated, as the Antarctic Ocean started to deposit vast amounts of diatom shells.

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Diatoms sequester carbon but Coccoliths do not.

Groundfish overfishing, diatom decline, and the marine silica cycle : lessons from Saanich Inlet, Canada, and the Baltic Sea cod crash

In this study, we link groundfish activity to the marine silica cycle and suggest that the drastic mid-1980s crash of the Baltic Sea cod (Gadus morhua) population triggered a cascade of events leading to decrease in dissolved silica (DSi) and diatom abundance in the water. We suggest that this seemingly unrelated sequence of events was caused by a marked decline in sediment resuspension associated with reduced groundfish activity resulting from the cod crash. In a study in Saanich Inlet, British Columbia, Canada, we discovered that, by resuspending bottom sediments, groundfish triple DSi fluxes from the sediments and reduce silica accumulation therein. Using these findings and the available oceanographic and environmental data from the Baltic Sea, we estimate that overfishing and recruitment failure of Baltic cod reduced by 20% the DSi supply from bottom sediments to the surface water leading to a decline in the diatom population in the Baltic Sea. The major importance of the marginal ocean in the marine silica cycle and the associated high population density of groundfish suggest that groundfish play a major role in the silica cycle. We postulate that dwindling groundfish populations caused by anthropogenic perturbations, e.g., overfishing and bottom water anoxia, may cause shifts in marine phytoplankton communities.

Authors : Katz, Timor; Yahel, Gitai; Yahel, Ruthy; Tunnicliffe, Verena; Herut, Barak; Snelgrove, Paul; Crusius, John; Lazar, Boaz

https://darchive.mblwhoilibrary.org/handle/1912/3697

Nitrogen Cycle

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=117744&org=NSF&from=news

Press Release 10-183
Too Much of a Good Thing: Human Activities Overload Ecosystems with Nitrogen

Resulting ecological damage is serious, but could be reduced by wider use of more sustainable, time-honored practices

At Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, excess nitrogen promotes algae growth, which leads to eutrophication. Credit and Larger Version

October 7, 2010

Humans are overloading ecosystems with nitrogen through the burning of fossil fuels and an increase in nitrogen-producing industrial and agricultural activities, according to a new study. While nitrogen is an element that is essential to life, it is an environmental scourge at high levels.

According to the study, excess nitrogen that is contributed by human activities pollutes fresh waters and coastal zones, and may contribute to climate change. Nevertheless, such ecological damage could be reduced by the adoption of time-honored sustainable practices.

Appearing in the October 8, 2010 edition of Science and conducted by an international team of researchers, the study was partially funded by the National Science Foundation.

The Nitrogen Cycle

The nitrogen cycle--which has existed for billions of years--transforms non-biologically useful forms of nitrogen found in the atmosphere into various biologically useful forms of nitrogen that are needed by living things to create proteins, DNA and RNA, and by plants to grow and photosynthesize. The transformation of biologically useful forms of nitrogen to useful forms of nitrogen is known as nitrogen fixation.

Mostly mediated by bacteria that live in legume plant roots and soils, nitrogen fixation and other components of the nitrogen cycle weave and wind through the atmosphere, plants, subsurface plant roots, and soils; the nitrogen cycle involves many natural feedback relationships between plants and microorganisms.

According to the Science paper, since pre-biotic times, the nitrogen cycle has gone through several major phases. The cycle was initially controlled by slow volcanic processes and lightning and then by anaerobic organisms as biological activity started. By about 2.5 billion years ago, as molecular oxygen appeared on Earth, a linked suite of microbial processes evolved to form the modern nitrogen cycle.

Human Impacts on the Nitrogen Cycle

But the start of the 20th century, human contributions to the nitrogen cycle began skyrocketing. "In fact, no phenomenon has probably impacted the nitrogen cycle more than human inputs of nitrogen into the cycle in the last 2.5 billion years," says Paul Falkowski of Rutgers University, a member of the research team.

"Altogether, human activities currently contribute twice as much terrestrial nitrogen fixation as natural sources, and provide around 45 percent of the total biological useful nitrogen produced annually on Earth," says Falkowski. Much of the human contributions of nitrogen into ecosystems come from an 800 percent increase in the use of nitrogen fertilizers from 1960 to 2000.

Another problem: Much of nitrogen fertilizer that is used worldwide is applied inefficiently. As a result, about 60 percent of the nitrogen contained in applied fertilizer is never incorporated into plants and so is free to wash out of root zones, and then pollute rivers, lakes, aquifers and coastal areas through eutrophication. (Eutrophication is a process caused by excess nutrients that depletes oxygen in water bodies and ultimately leads to the death of animal life.)

In addition, some reactions involving nitrogen release nitrogen oxide into the atmosphere. Nitrogen oxide is a greenhouse gas that has 300 times (per molecule) the warming potential of carbon dioxide. In addition, nitrogen oxide destroys stratospheric ozone, which protects the earth from harmful ultraviolet (UV-B) radiation.

Methods to Reduce Nitrogen Overloading

"Natural feedbacks driven by microorganisms will likely produce a new steady-state over time scales of many decades," says Falkowski. "Through this steady state, excess nitrogen added from human sources will be removed at rates equivalent to rates of addition, without accumulating."

But meanwhile, the Earth's population is approaching 7 billion people, and so ongoing pressures for food production are continuing to increase. "There is no way to feed people without fixing huge amounts of nitrogen from the atmosphere, and that nitrogen is presently applied to crop plants very ineffectively." says Falkowski.

So unless promising interventions are taken, the damage done by humans to the Earth's nitrogen cycle will persist for decades or centuries. These promising interventions, which would be designed to reduce the need to use fertilizers that add nitrogen to ecological systems, could include:

• Using systematic crop rotations that would supply nitrogen that would otherwise be provided by fertilizers;
• Optimizing the timing and amounts of fertilizer applications, adopting selected breeding techniques or developing genetically engineered varieties of plants that would increase the efficiency of nitrogen use;
• Using traditional breeding techniques to boost the ability of economically important varieties of wheat, barley and rye to interact favorably with the microbial communities associated with plant root systems and do so in ways that enhance the efficiency of nitrogen use.

"While the processes of eutrophication have been recognized for many years, only recently have scientists been able to begin placing the anthropogenic processes in the context of an understanding of the broader biogeochemical cycles of the planet," says Robert Burnap, an NSF program director. This is an important article because it concisely develops this understanding and also provides reasonable predictions regarding the economic and policy dimensions of the problem."

-NSF-

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The report does not discuss why algal blooms result in low Dissolved Oxygen levels of water when Diatom Algae are responsible for about 25% of the oxygen in the atmosphere.

It does not discuss why the increase in N in lakes and oceans is causing cyanobacteria blooms but not Diatom blooms.

It mentions "economically important varieties of wheat, barley and rye .." but does not mention economically important phytoplankton / algae - Diatoms.

Diatoms by Richard Henkels

http://www.science20.com/news_releases/mighty_diatom_weighs_climate_change?nocache=1

The diatom is the most vital organism on the planet for it feeds the oceans and as it sequesters carbon through photosynthesis it gives off the critical core of the 60% of the earth's oxygen (the percentage attributed to the oceans.
Even more, where this oxygen would most logically be carried over land one finds the principal rains that water the core of the crops produced by the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere.
In any case the triangular North Pacific would, most logically, pinch water movement into place and the S-shaped Atlantic lift.
The fact that the South Atlantic draws water from both the Indian and the South Pacific (around Cape Horn) when it should be slipping with the wind, makes this [Cape Horn] the roughest of waters on earth (due to the Atlantic's lifting).
As this foreign (trans-equatorial) jet enters the North Atlantic it draws the seed diatoms from the area around the Sargasso and at its convectional bend, southeast of George's Bank (a shoal documented as the primary reproductive section of the North Atlantic for fish) the sinking Gulf Stream creates great eddies known as Gulf Rings that carry seed diatoms on an arching path towards George's Bank in the same season the precise food for the triggering of the diatom bloom should be surfacing at Cape Cod (a deposit of silica) to be swept off shore to meet and be inhaled by the watery tornado-like Rings.
Most all the newly hatched fish (and shellfish) of George's Bank from cod, to flounder, to hake and herring depend for survival upon the diatom.
If one adult cod lays between 4 million and 7 million eggs and the two dozen other species that spawn here also depend upon diatoms. . . have the fish stocks in the North Atlantic have declining over the past 70 years been cause primarily by over-fishing as most everyone believes, or could it have to do with the extreme erosion of Cape Cod and Nantucket? It is my belief that this erosion has been mistakenly blamed on winter storms that sweep up this coast known as "Northeasters."
The truth is that the Labrador Current, the richest of cold water veins, is being ruptured. Without silica in this current, the Cape and Nantucket erode and the diatom bloom as a geometric progression, is being chopped before it begins.
Without diatoms, the newly hatched starve soon after taking life.
With a greatly reduced diatom count in the North Atlantic the fishing grounds from the Grand Banks, to the southern tip of Greenland, to the southern tip of Iceland, the British Isles, North Sea and even the North Pacific fed via the Bering Strait and Bering Sea. As this rich super-cooled flow passes out on the floor of the Bering Sea it creates the Alaskan "King" Crab (proof of this rich food).
Where the oxygen produced by the bloom would most logically be carried over land one finds the rains over the British Isles (that then drift over Northern Europe). Where it surfaces in the Northeastern Pacific it creates the nearly constant rains of the Pacific Northwest and Canadian West that then drift over North America (watering the farmlands of the Midwest, "breadbasket of thew world".
This means the rupture of the vein that triggers the diatom bloom is reducing fish stocks in the two most productive oceans on the planet.
If one were to repair this mechanism it would generate over a trillion dollars of revenue for the United Sates and the same for the rest of the world.
By repair the Bloom one could turn vast areas of these oceans into carbon dioxide-absorbing, oxygen emitting surfaces.

Richard Henkels

Diatoms in Aquaculture

A video about Diatoms in aquaculture and use of Nualgi is available on Youtube -

www.youtube.com/?v=zV9XangaWaI

Grand Lake, Ohio - Update

http://www.wapakdailynews.com/content/view/215785/27/

Officials unveil information to help restore lake

Thursday, 09 September 2010

By MIKE BURKHOLDER Staff Writer CELINA — Ohio State officials Tuesday night unveiled another piece in the puzzle in the fight to help restore the water quality of Grand Lake St. Marys. Directors of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), Ohio Department of Health and Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) held a public forum at the Celina Fieldhouse as a way to brief residents regarding a pair of pilot projects on the lake. Several hundred people who attended the meeting were allowed to submit questions to a moderator, which were then answered by members of the panel. Russ Gibson, with the Ohio EPA, gave a brief presentation regarding the alum dosing test project. The project, which is slated to begin Sept. 20, calls for liquid alum to be applied to six locations along the lake — West Beach, Harmon’s Channel, 4-H Camp, West Bank boat ramp, Otterbein channel No. 1 and Otterbein channel No. 2 — for a total of 53 acres. “It’s designed to provide some near-term relief to reducing the nutrient loads that are within the lake itself,” Gibson said. When introduced into the water column, the alum will bind with the phosphorus and force it to the bottom of the lake. The alum will not add to the sediment at the bottom of the lake, and Gibson said the compound poses no risks to humans, fish or other animals. “It’s something that has been safely used in nearly every drinking water supply and treatment system — the city of Celina uses alum every day,” Gibson said. “It’s been used in more than 150 lakes successfully across the country. “We have the literature to support that alum will be successful in helping to reduce the internal phosphorus load that is in the lake,” he said. “Just to give you an idea, Grand Lake St. Marys has a very, very high phosphorus level. Our goal with this project is to reduce the internal phosphorus and inactivate those levels by 60 to 85 percent. That is substantial.” Gibson encouraged residents to come out Sept. 20 to witness the start of the four-day project. He also reassured the crowd the alum dosing poses zero risk to people. “There is no harm in coming out and watching,” Gibson said. “If you happen to be around the lake one of those days, drive by and look at what’s going on.” The new project is different than the one proposed by Gov. Ted Strickland in July. That project called for two sites of 20 acres a piece. “We just really had a very difficult time finding two different sites that were that large,” Gibson said. “So we elected to instead do six sites that totaled 54 acres.” Once the alum is applied via a barge, the water will instantly turn milky. Within two hours, Gibson said the results will be noticeable. “As that alum settles down through the water column, it’s basically stripping the water of the phosphorus and other nutrients that are in that water column and the water will become remarkably clear,” Gibson said. “We do not expect Grand Lake St. Marys to become gem clear. The demonstration sites, for some period of time, will be very clear.” The second pilot project, which is being conducted by Algaeventure, of Columbus, involves introducing silica into the water column with the hopes of flipping the bad algae into diatoms. Diatoms are a species of algae that do not produce toxins and if the conditions are right, will dominate harmful algae. That project started last week at a site near the city of Celina. During the question-and-answer session, panel members handled a variety of questions. Some ranged from dredging the entire lake to the harmful side effects of alum. One resident asked what is being done to rid the lake of geese. ODNR Director Sean Logan said geese produce waste approximately 28 times a day and there are more than 2,000 of them living around the lake. “We believe that we have a resident population of 2,500,” Logan said. “We will continue, through controlled hunts in designated locations, to continue to reduce the population.” The question of opening up the spillway to flush out the lake was posed to the panel. Logan said that was not a viable option and would produce little, if any, benefit. “The average length of time the water in Grand Lake St. Marys takes to come in and come out is 1.3 years,” Logan said. Logan also said opening the spillway would fail to reduce the internal loading in the lake — a root cause of the algae bloom problems during the past two years. Logan said the depth also is as hurdle. “Because of its shallowness, it does not have the same stratification that would lead you to believe or would it allow such exchange of water as the question asks,” Logan said. “You could open up both tubes for 24 hours and only get 1 inch drop.” Dredging also was brought up. Logan said state official will focus on spot dredging near tributaries that lead into the lake. “Right now, in Montezuma Bay, we are going to go a little deeper where we already have a spoil site available and there is already an active dredging project in place,” Logan said. “The key to dredging is the spoil site. Where do you put the dredged material to allow it to dewater in a quick enough fashion so that you don’t have water being your capacity. We are open to all sorts of suggestions.” Logan said state officials are open to help solving the problem. However, he again stressed that dredging the entire lake is not a viable option. “We do need your help,” Logan said. “We need help in identifying upload disposal sites, I think we should start with Prairie Creek. We need upload land owners to help identify where we can have disposal of this material.” Winter manure application procedures also were posed to the panel. Logan said any manure application between Dec. 15 and March 15 would have to comply with a series of guidelines in order to be allowed. In two years, Logan said there will be a ban on winter manure applications. “The proper crop to uptake the nutrients that are applied, set back distance from stream, the future weather and the soil,” Logan said of the requirements. “The soil will always tell you what it can handle and what it cannot handle.” Logan also stressed that the ultimate solution is in the hands of landowners, not politicians. “We all are part of the solution,” Logan said. “The ultimate, long-term solution to this problem does not lay with government, it lays with private landowners. You need to unite together and say that we want a better future and I know that you do. We just need to step up to the plate, each and every one of us.”

Last Updated ( Thursday, 09 September 2010 )