US Rivers Contribute a Lot of CO2 to the Atmosphere

A collaboration of American universities and research institutes has recently established in a new study that rivers and streams throughout the nation contribute significantly larger amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than scientists first estimated.

The research, which was funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology (DEB), highlights a new source of atmospheric CO2 that was not taken into account while creating computer models of Earth's climate.

“The research should enable more predictive and precise models of carbon cycling at regional to global scales,” DEB program director Henry Gholz explains. “Direct measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations and fluxes in streams and rivers are still extremely rare,” he adds.

The amount of CO2 rivers place in the air is equivalent to what a car would release by burning 40 billion gallons of gasoline. Such a car would be able to travel to the Moon and back about 3.4 million times before running out of gas.