Specialists are confident wetlands can help human society put a leash on climate change

Jul 16, 2013 20:31 GMT  ·  By

One would assume that, as atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to increase, natural ecosystems would get fed up with this chemical compound and quit absorbing it.

By the looks of it, this is not the case, at least as far as wetlands are concerned.

The journal Global Change Biology has recently witnessed the publication of a paper stating that, as carbon dioxide levels worldwide continue to increase, so does the wetland plants' “eagerness” to clean the air by absorbing it.

Specialists say that, all things considered, elevated carbon dioxide levels translate into a 32% increase in the CO2 amounts wetland plants typically suck in.

Smithsonian explains that, according to plant physiologist Bert Drake, this basically means that an increase in global carbon pollution could turn wetlands into so-called carbon sinks.

Once this happens, human society could get some much needed help in terms of putting a leash on climate change and global warming.

“The results of this study suggest that wetland ecosystems will assimilate more carbon as atmospheric CO2 levels continue to rise beyond the level of 400 ppm reached in May 2013,” Bert Drake argues.

Said researcher and his colleagues base their claim that wetlands develop a sweet tooth for CO2 when they are exposed to high concentrations of the chemical compound, on data collected while carrying out a series of experiments on marsh plots.

As part of these experiments, some marsh plots were left exposed to today's atmosphere, while others were exposed to air whose CO2 concentration exceeded 700 ppm.

The marsh lands in the second category absorbed almost a third more carbon dioxide than the ones in the first category, the researchers say.

What's interesting is that, despite the fact that they've spent 19 years researching how wetlands respond to elevated carbon dioxide levels, scientists are unable to say what these natural ecosystems do with all the CO2 they pull from the air.

“The challenge remains to identify the fate of the assimilated carbon,” they write in their paper.