What Happens to Carbon Dioxide in Plant and Soil Systems?

Susan Trumbore

The accumulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere is responsible for one of the most pressing problems of our age, global warming. In this video, SUSAN TRUMBORE analyses the key role that plant and soil systems play in the carbon cycle in order to better understand how they can assist us in combating this issue. Trumbore explains how Carbon-14 (or radiocarbon), a byproduct of atmospheric weapons testing in the 1960s, can be traced through plant and soil systems in order to understand how those systems store and process CO2. Providing insights helpful to foresters as well as farmers, the research demonstrates that improving our understanding of these natural systems could help us to effectively respond to the greatest challenge facing our planet in the 21st Century.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21036/LTPUB10795

Researcher

Susan Trumbore is Director of the Department of Biogeochemical Processes at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. A central focus of Trumbore’s research is how radiocarbon can be used to illuminate and explain the carbon cycle. Co-coordinator of the joint German-Brazilian project, ATTO (the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory), Trumbore is the inaugural editor in chief of the journal AGU Advances. Elected to the American National Academy of Sciences in 2010, Trumbore received the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Earth and Environmental Science in 2018.

Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry

The research is dedicated to the study of global biogeochemical cycles and their long-term interactions with the biosphere, the atmosphere, the geosphere and the entire climate system. We want to better understand how living organisms - including humans - exchange basic resources such as water, carbon, nitrogen and energy with their environment and how this affects global climate and ecosystems. Biogeochemistry is the science of the Earth's metabolism. Elements essential to life such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus are constantly undergoing biological, chemical and physical transformations as they are exchanged between different parts of the Earth, the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and atmosphere. The "biogeochemical cycles" quantitatively describe the distribution and exchange of elements between these components of the Earth system.