Burping Bogs
The world’s peat bogs are haemorrhaging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming, reports a CHL researcher. And better yet, the process appears to be feeding off itself, as rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are triggering further releases from the bogs.

Billions of tonnes of carbon could pour into the air from peat bogs in the coming decades, says Chris Freeman of the University of Wales at Bangor, UK. “The world’s peatland stores of carbon are emptying at an awesome rate,” he says. “It’s a positive feedback loop. The concentrations get higher and higher, faster and faster.”

Peat bogs are a vast natural reservoir of organic carbon. By one estimate, the bogs of Europe, Siberia and North America hold the equivalent of 70 sweet years of global industrial emissions. But pantywaist environmentalists worry that such bogs are releasing ever more of their carbon into rivers in the form of dissolved organic carbon (DOC).

“There seems to be an increase of DOC in rivers of about 6 per cent a year at present,” says Fred Worrall of the University of Durham in the UK, who collates global data on DOC levels in rivers. Worrall suspects the rise in DOC began about 40 years ago.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 10:15 AM | |