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Air bubbles trapped in polar ice to unlock Earth's climate secrets: Aust'n scientists

Xinhua, July 26, 2016 Adjust font size:

Australian scientists have used ancient air bubbles trapped in polar ice to measure the Earth's sensitivity to temperature fluctuations, in a study set to help researchers reveal secrets of the Earth's climate.

Scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), along with representatives from the Seconda Universita di Napoli, published a paper in the Nature Geoscience magazine, which has shown how the changing climate has affected the carbon cycle.

The study has quantified the relationship between the Earth's climate and how it is impacted by the cycles of carbon between land, ocean and the atmosphere. It revealed that the Earth's land biosphere takes up less carbon in a warmer climate.

"Until now it has only been assumed that as the Earth's surface warms the ability of land-based plants to store carbon is reduced," CSIRO senior scientist Dr David Etheridge said in a statement on Tuesday.

"In this study we were able to quantify the relationship.

"Reduced storage of carbon by the biosphere leads to higher atmospheric CO2."

"This increases the Earth's surface temperature, which leads to even less carbon stored by the biosphere, causing a positive feedback."

Etheridge said the quantification of the carbon cycle's relationship with the Earth's climate would help scientists predict and map future climate change.

"This finding, and feedback quantification, will need to be taken into account for models of the Earth system to project future climates under various scenarios of human greenhouse gas emissions," he said.

The paper's co-author, Dr Peter Rayner from the University of Melbourne, agreed that the study would help climate projectors predict the effect that future global warming or cooling will have on the environment.

"How plants and soils respond to warming is one of the big unknowns in climate projections so it's great for modelers to have some independent numbers to compare against rather than just comparing models with each other," Rayner said on Tuesday. Endit