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Carbon in sentence

2411 examples of Carbon in a sentence

Here's where the soil comes in: there is about three thousand billion metric tons of carbon in the soil.
That's roughly about 315 times the amount of carbon that we release into the atmosphere currently.
And there's twice more carbon in soil than there is in vegetation and air.
There's more carbon in soil than there is in all of the world's vegetation, including the lush tropical rainforests and the giant sequoias, the expansive grasslands, all of the cultivated systems, and every kind of flora you can imagine on the face of the earth, plus all the carbon that's currently up in the atmosphere, combined, and then twice over.
Hence, a very small change in the amount of carbon stored in soil can make a big difference in maintenance of the earth's atmosphere.
But soil's not just simply a storage box for carbon, though.
It operates more like a bank account, and the amount of carbon that's in soil at any given time is a function of the amount of carbon coming in and out of the soil.
Carbon comes into the soil through the process of photosynthesis, when green plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it to make their bodies, and upon death, their bodies enter the soil.
And carbon leaves the soil and goes right back up into the atmosphere when the bodies of those formerly living organisms decay in soil by the activity of microbes.
See, decomposition releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as well as other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide, but it also releases all the nutrients we all need to survive.
One of the things that makes soil such a fundamental component of any climate change mitigation strategy is because it represents a long-term storage of carbon.
Carbon that would have lasted maybe a year or two in decaying residue if it was left on the surface can stay in soil for hundreds of years, even thousands and more.
Soil biogeochemists like me study exactly how the soil system makes this possible, by locking away the carbon in physical association with minerals, inside aggregates of soil minerals, and formation of strong chemical bonds that bind the carbon to the surfaces of the minerals.
See when carbon is entrapped in soil, in these kinds of associations with soil minerals, even the wiliest of the microbes can't easily degrade it.
And carbon that's not degrading fast is carbon that's not going back into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases.
But the benefit of carbon sequestration is not just limited to climate change mitigation.
Soil that stores large amounts of carbon is healthy, fertile, soft.
And second: soil use and degradation, just in the last 200 years or so, has released 12 times more carbon into the atmosphere compared to the rate at which we're releasing carbon into the atmosphere right now.
Peatlands in polar environments store about a third of the global soil carbon reserves.
These peatlands have a permanently frozen ground underneath, the permafrost, and the carbon was able to build up in these soils over long periods of time because even though plants are able to photosynthesize during the short, warm summer months, the environment quickly turns cold and dark, and then microbes are not able to efficiently break down the residue.
So the soil carbon bank in these polar environments built up over hundreds of thousands of years.
And when permafrost thaws and drains, it makes it possible for microbes to come in and rather quickly decompose all this carbon, with the potential to release hundreds of billions of metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere in the form of greenhouse gases.
I mean managing land in a way that's smart about maximizing how much carbon we store in soil.
And we can accomplish this by putting in place deep-rooted perennial plants, putting back forests whenever possible, reducing tillage and other disturbances from agricultural practices, including optimizing the use of agricultural chemicals and grazing and even adding carbon to soil, whenever possible, from recycled resources such as compost and even human waste.
This effort that started in France is known as the "4 per 1000" effort, and it sets an aspirational goal to increase the amount of carbon stored in soil by 0.4 percent annually, using the same kind of climate-smart land management practices I mentioned earlier.
And if this effort's fully successful, it can offset a third of the global emissions of fossil-fuel-derived carbon into the atmosphere.
But even if this effort is not fully successful, but we just start heading in that direction, we still end up with soils that are healthier, more fertile, are able to produce all the food and resources that we need for human populations and more, and also soils that are better capable of sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and helping with climate change mitigation.
We can start by treating the soil with the respect that it deserves: respect for its ability as the basis of all life on earth, respect for its ability to serve as a carbon bank and respect for its ability to control our climate.
Number four: pollution in the region has increased the amount of black carbon that's deposited on our glaciers.
Black carbon is like soot.
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