Nadine, as the plant life dies off [taking insects, birds and all other beasties I can think of with it] they stop sucking in CO2. If they die off because they are buried in snow and kilometres of ice, their carbon doesn't get a last gasp recycling by bacteria and other bugs into the air. It gets buried like people going for cryogenic storage in the hopes of living again in better times.
Meanwhile, volcanoes go on pouring it out. Volcanoes get their CO2 and other gases from the sedimentary layers which are subducted as the ocean floor is plunged into the earth. The subduction takes down water, fish, whale, hagfish, radiolarian and other skeletal remains, poop from fish and others, trapped fish oils and corpse leftovers, eroded limestone, coal and other debris from the land.
Under a lot of pressure and heat [which is what you get 200 kilometres inside the earth when being shoved down with the oceanic crust] there is a lot of chemical reacting takes place and oil is formed and methane and other stuff which floats up, along with spare water, through the cracks in the rocks and is mixed with lava inside magma chambers.
Some leaks away to be stored in gas fields and oil fields [that's my theory and you have not read that anywhere else and that's where oil really comes from - there is no way to get all the oil in Saudi Arabia and around that area by the usual theory of fish dying and sinking to the bottom and forming oil when they get buried in sediment].
The rest of the floaty liquids sit in the volcanic system, waiting for pressures to build up below and pressures to be relieved above. When the right pressure balance happens, which is when the moon, sun and dry, low water table, low atmospheric pressure days coincide to lower the downward pressure, the column of magma starts to go bubbly as the liquids at their critical points turn to gases. As they turn to gas, they expand dramatically.
That pushes the column upward, which reduces the pressure because water and stuff up above is pushed out of the way, which results in more gas forming, which expands the column more, which pushes more stuff out of the way and before you know it, KABLAMMMM, the whole lot is turning to a vast column of frothing pumice [which if you've seen it is mostly gas and you can carry a rock as big as a small refrigerator and it floats like a cork on water] 10 kilometres into the sky.
The hydrocarbons in the column which are exposed to air burn in a vast explosion which gives a lot of bang for your buck.
When it comes down again, it's quite a serious business too. The WTC was a million tonnes of steel or thereabouts, falling a couple of hundred metres on average. Well, you can imagine 100 cubic kilometres of pumice coming down in a hurry from 10 kilometres high or even 2 kilometres high over an hour or so or maybe only half an hour or less because the eruptions like that don't take long. Anyway, it causes frothy molten pumice to expand outwards at maybe 200 or more km per hour.
Hinuera stone was formed from a pumice flow 100 kilometres from Taupo, down the old river valley. The pumice which doesn't remain in bulk liquid form rains down frozen [it cools sufficiently in the air to form a solid outer layer] over a big area [like 100 kilometres away, depending on the wind].
Volcanoes are major CO2 recyclers of the subducted carbon [including that from limestone, bones etc].
CO2 which dissolves in the ocean is on a one way ticket to the ocean floor [other than a bit which comes out by birds going fishing]. The fishy food chain which starts with dissolved CO2 and plants near the surface ends at the bottom of the ocean with hagfish [which are closely related to L M Ericsson - inside joke - see QUALCOMM discussions from 1996].
To make a long story short, plant life dying off increases CO2 levels and therefore warming and therefore ends the ice-age cycle, helped along by the greening of deserts, reduced cloud cover and reducing snow cover on the peripheries of the frozen areas.
It's a long period cycle and we need to stop it by getting the carbon back out of the ground and into the atmosphere and warming the place up. We can't do much, but we can do a bit.
Trust me, we should cancel Kyoto [the CO2 deal anyway, not the whole city]. CO2 is good and so is H2O, another greenhouse gas which is much more prolific.
Mqurice |
