By John DeFore

Here’s a mad-scientist fantasy for those who favor controlling carbon as part of the solution to climate change: Learn to love typhoons (well, one aspect of them).

But researchers from Ohio State University have made discoveries about those storms that, as a university report puts it, “could help scientists make better estimates of how much carbon is in the atmosphere — and help them decipher its effect on global climate change.”

In a highly technical article in the June edition of Geology, the O.S.U. scientists say they’ve found that “a single typhoon in Taiwan buries as much carbon in the ocean — in the form of sediment — as all the other rains in that country all year long combined.”

Their project, which required them to venture out into two full-force storms, was the first to study the sediment carried off to sea by streams while a typhoon was underway. Any rain can sequester a certain amount of carbon if it contributes to weathering mountains — physically, by carrying organic matter into the sea, or chemically, in a process that leaves calcium carbonate scattered at the bottom of the ocean. (There, as associate professor Anne Carey puts it, it eventually becomes part of sedimentary rock, and doesn’t return to the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years.)

The team’s findings confirm scientists’ suspicion that the violent weather of a typhoon carries away an unusually large amount of carbon; only through actual mid-typhoon sampling, though, were researchers able to analyze the sediment delivery. They warn that collecting data from further storms is necessary to confirm a long-term pattern, but in 61 million tons of sediment washed off in one river during a single typhoon, “some 500,000 tons consisted of particles of carbon created during chemical weathering” — or about 95 percent as much as that river would carry during the year’s normal rainfall.

Understanding this weathering is essential, the researchers say, to constructing an accurate “carbon budget,” or assessment of how much carbon is entering and being withdrawn from the atmosphere, a key part of any study of climate change.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media