Fjords help fight global warming, absorb 18 million tons of carbon per year
Scientists studying fjords have discovered a surprising fact: the high altitude inlets soak up carbon faster than other marine ecosystems. Although fjords cover only 0.3 percent of the Earth’s surface area, they absorb nearly 11 percent of the total carbon sequestered by marine sediment – to the the tune of 18 million tons, researchers report in Nature Geoscience.
The role of fjords in the carbon cycle have been largely overlooked until now. Scientists who study such things tend to focus their efforts on large bodies of water, like oceans, which cover roughly 70 percent of the planet’s surface. Because of their size, oceans and other large bodies of water are easy to monitor by satellite, University of Washington geochemist, Rick Keil, tells Nature.
Not so for fjords. These oftentimes remote inlets can be less than two miles wide, making them hard to map, difficult to get to, and sometimes impossible to study from the ground.
“Many have no roads leading to them, so you can only get to them by helicopter,” Irina Overeem, a sediment geologist at the University of Colorado Boulder tells Nature. “You can’t take samples when there is ice — and for some places, like Greenland, that is about nine months of the year.”
http://natmonitor.com/2015/05/05/fjords-help-fight-global-warming-absorb-18-million-tons-of-carbon-per-year/
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