
Center scientist Anthony Aufdenkampe explains, "It rains on average once per week, or 15 percent of the year, but streams and rivers move most of their annual loads on those days. "The bigger the storm, the greater the disproportionate load, so you might have a single 100-year storm event move 25 percent of the material for an entire decade," says Aufdenkampe.
"This is important because fresh waters and the carbon they transport play a major role in the global cycling of greenhouse gases." Irene could reveal much about how soil erosion into rivers might eventually bury carbon and sequester it from acting as a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
That's a primary goal of the Christina River Basin Critical Zone Observatory (CRB-CZO), funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Stroud Water Research Center and University of Delaware scientists are affiliated with the CRB-CZO....
Flooding in Newark, New Jersey, after Irene, shot by Behnam Esfahbod, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
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