Forests won’t stop climate change
The world’s tropical forests are rapidly losing their ability to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a worrying development that could accelerate climate change, reports The Guardian (U.K.). In a new study using data from 565 tropical forests across Africa and the Amazon, an international team of researchers found that the forests’ intake of carbon peaked in the 1990s. In the past decade, they’ve absorbed a third less—a difference of 23 billion tons, or about the same as a decade of fossil fuel emissions from the U.K., Germany, Canada, and France combined. Forests lose their ability to soak up carbon as trees dry out and die from droughts and higher temperatures, but the greatest threats to rain forests are logging, burning, and other forms of human activity. If the Amazon—the world’s largest tropical forest—continues to degrade at its current rate, researchers believe, it will turn from a carbon sink to a source of emissions by 2035. “Humans have been lucky so far, as tropical forests are mopping up lots of our pollution, but they can’t keep doing that indefinitely,” says senior author Simon Lewis, from Leeds University in the U.K.
new study that examined an ancient chunk of ocean-bed crust that now sits on its side in the Australian outback. The researchers examined the levels of two different isotopes of oxygen that seawater carried into the slab: Oxygen-16 and the slightly heavier atom Oxygen-18. After studying more than 100 rock samples, they determined that seawater contained more Oxygen-18 when the crust was formed 3.2 billion years ago. Today, land masses across Earth soak up heavier oxygen isotopes from water and lock them in clay-rich soils. The scientists suspect that the ancient ocean crust contains higher levels of Oxygen-18 because there were no soil-covered continents to absorb it. Study co-author Boswell Wing, from University of Colorado, Boulder, tells CNN.com that “teeny micro-continents” that resembled the Galapagos Islands might have stuck out of this ancient ocean. “We just don’t think that there was global-scale formation of continental soils like we have today.”
trained three pet dogs to identify which of two identical 4-inch wide objects had been warmed to about 22 degrees Fahrenheit above room temperature. All of the dogs were able to identify the hotter object at a distance of 5 feet. Scientists then scanned the brains of 13 dogs as they were exposed to a warm object and one kept at room temperature. Sure enough, the part of the brain linked to the dogs’ noses became more active when the pooches were shown the warm object. “It’s a fascinating discovery,” says Marc Bekoff, an expert on canine sniffing at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who wasn’t involved in the study. It “provides yet another window into the sensory worlds of dogs’ highly evolved cold noses.”