Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Global warming may increase methane emissions from freshwater ecosystems
A press release from the University of Exeter: New research
led by the University of Exeter suggests that rising global temperatures will
increase the quantity of the key greenhouse gas methane emitted from freshwater
ecosystems to the Earth’s atmosphere – which could in turn lead to further
warming.
The collaborative study, led by Dr Gabriel Yvon-Durocher
from the University of Exeter, collated data from hundreds of laboratory
experiments and field surveys to demonstrate that the speed at which methane
fluxes increase with temperature was the same whether single species
populations of methanogens, microbial communities or whole ecosystems were
analyzed.
Dr Yvon-Durocher said: “This is important because biological
methane fluxes are a major component of global methane emissions, but there is
uncertainty about their magnitude and the factors that regulate them. This
hinders our ability to predict the response of this key component of the carbon
cycle to global warming. Our research provides scientists with an important
clue about the mechanisms that may control the response of methane emissions
from ecosystems to global warming.”
Methane is an important greenhouse gas because it has 25
times the global warming effect of carbon dioxide. The production of methane in
freshwater ecosystems is brought about by an ancient group of microorganisms
called Archaea that exist in waterlogged sediments where there is no oxygen.
They play an important role in the decomposition of biomass, but rather than
producing carbon dioxide, they produce methane as a by-product of their
metabolism.
The report, published today in the leading scientific
journal Nature, also showed that the temperature response of methane production
is much higher than respiration (production of carbon dioxide) or
photosynthesis (consumption of carbon dioxide), indicating that global warming
may increase the amount of methanerelative to carbon dioxide emitted globally
from aquatic ecosystems, terrestrial wetlands and rice paddies...
Archaeobacteria in a hot springs in Yellowstone National Park, shot by Wing-Chi Poon, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license
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