Global CO2 Release From Peat Bogs Speeding Up - Positive Feedback Underway [View All]

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"The world’s peat bogs are haemorrhaging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming, warns a UK researcher. And worse still, 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 alarming rate,” he says. “It’s a vicious circle. The problem gets worse and worse, 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 years of global industrial emissions. But concern is growing 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.

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Recent data from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Lancaster, UK shows a 90 per cent increase in DOC levels in Welsh mountain rivers since 1988. “The rate of acceleration suggests that we have disturbed something critical that controls the stability of the carbon cycle in our planet,” Freeman says. “On these trends, by the middle of the century, DOC emissions from peat bogs and rivers could be as big a source of CO2 to the atmosphere as burning fossil fuels.”

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http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996124