Hurricanes protect Earth from global warming, Interesting read.
Posted by
hanna on 2/5/2010, 11:24 am
http://www.russiatoday.com/scitech/news/32162
Typhoons and hurricanes act as a natural pressure valve to help Earth resist global warming, according to a new study. The findings in the Nature Geoscience journal say the storms capture large amounts of carbon and bury them on the ocean floor.
Carbon dioxide is one of the 'greenhouse gases' that make the climate on our planet warmer.
The more of it that is released into the atmosphere the stronger and more frequent hurricanes become.
Hurricanes and typhoons carry huge amounts of water onto land which creates floods. This water washes away the carbon trapped in plants and carries it via rivers to be finally buried deep under the ocean.
Scientists from Britain, Japan and Taiwan studied Taiwan's LiWu river. They estimate between 80 to 90 percent of the recent carbon deposits there were carried by hurricane-caused floods and say storms create 'optimum conditions' to eliminate them from the carbon cycle.
But hurricanes alone are not enough to counter all man-caused pollution, the study warns.
"The rate at which this happens is around 100 to 1,000 times slower than the amount of carbon dioxide that is being pumped into the atmosphere by man's activity," said Robert Hilton, from Cambridge University, who was one of the scientists who led the research.
Many modern projects aimed at curbing greenhouse emission mimic nature's way and store carbon dioxide in underground storages or deep in the sea shelf.
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Hurricanes protect Earth from global warming, Interesting read. - hanna, 2/5/2010, 11:24 am Post A Reply
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