BIOLOGY 152 Lecture Notes - Lecture 38: Carbon-12
Document Summary
The carbon cycle: terrestrial components + ocean components. We expect the oceans to be 3x more acidic than it was during the industrial era: carbon in the co2 ends up in organisms and becomes their shell. Carbon is sequestered as fossil fuels and in ocean sediments. Humans released stored carbon by burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. Carbon cycles through several compartments: atmosphere, oceans, biological, geological. Humans are releasing carbon from geological sinks faster than it can be returned and absorbed into the ocean. Layers of snow represent the seasonal amounts of snow that fall: the snow traps air, that eventually turn into bubbles that represent the atmosphere at that specific time -> we can look at the amount of carbon dioxide. We can look at the ratio of isotopes of different gasses to get an estimate of the temperature. A great location to measure atmospheric co2.
