Washington [US], February 4 : Weathering is the process by which rocks, rain, and carbon dioxide help govern the Earth’s climate over thousands of years, much like a thermostat.
A new study performed by Penn State scientists could help us better understand how this thermostat reacts to temperature changes.
Because many factors go into weathering, it has been challenging to use results of laboratory experiments alone to create global estimates of how weathering responds to temperature changes, the scientists said.
“When you do experiments in the laboratory versus taking samples from soil or a river, you get different values,” Brantley said, adding, “So what we tried to do in this research is look across those different spatial scales and figure out how we can make sense of all this data geochemists around the world been accumulating about weathering on the planet. And this study is a model for how we can do that.”
Rain takes the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and creates a weak acid that falls to Earth and wears away silicate rocks the surface. The byproducts are carried by streams and rivers to the ocean where the carbon is eventually locked away in sedimentary rocks, the scientists said.
But much remains unknown about how sensitive weathering is to changing temperatures, partly because of the long spatial and time scales involved.
Brantley said the field of critical zone science — which examines landscapes from the tallest vegetation to the deepest groundwater — has helped scientists better understand the complex interactions that influence weathering.
“It’s only when you start crossing spatial and time scales that you start seeing what’s really important,” Brantley said, adding, “Surface area is really important. You can measure all the rate constants you want for that solution in the lab, but until you can tell me how does surface area form out there in the natural system, you are never going to be able to predict the real system.”
Their model may be helpful for understanding how weathering will respond to future climate change, and in evaluating man-made attempts to increase weathering to draw more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — like carbon sequestration.
Though warming may speed up weathering, pulling all the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that humans have added could take thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, the scientists said. (ANI)
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