I am still on the Carbon Cycle thing.

December 29, 2006 by mike.

Here’s a good website from Kansas State University about the carbon cycle. The website includes a basic analysis of how the carbon cycle can be manipulated to reduce the buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide. You can look at the supply side - burning fossil fuels, cutting down trees - or the storage side - into the ocean, or increased vegetation, or into soil storage.The part of the carbon cycle I have been thinking about for the past few days is the ocean storage element.

As carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere in larger concentrations it also starts to build at greater levels in sea water. This is not so good I fear. The bipeds on the planet have used the waterways as dumpsters for thousands and thousands of years. Some of what we have dumped in the water has really not been a problem. Organic compounds that break down easily in amounts that the waterways can breakdown are essentially inconsequential. But as we bipeds have started creating more complex materials that are less easily broken down, we have started to create a bit of a mess in the waterways. One of the most striking examples of that sort of thing was the day in June 1969 when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught on fire. The actual 1969 Cuyahoga River fire was somewhat apocryphal, but still it’s a feature of a certain biped’s impact on rivers that any river, anywhere, can actually support combustion. In a more natural state, I don’t think you could get a river to burn with a blowtorch.

Anyway….

Despite the better jpegs available when a river catches on fire, I am thinking about the less news-worthy, but more catastrophic picture of oceans dying. And this slow ocean death is at least partly based on the build up of carbon in the oceans.

This is not a minor thing. We really have no way of knowing to what extent we are starting to knock out some of the fundamental forms of ocean life and whether we can reverse or even slow the trend. As Chief Sealth noted, the earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth. We are a strand in the web of life. The web of life is fragile.

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