Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16018-w

by graderjs • 5 years ago

133 57 5 years ago

nature.com

atoav• 5 years ago

We are doomed. But on the other hand we created a lot of value for the shareholders for a few decades.

watertom• 5 years ago

It was the rise of phytoplankton that created the atmosphere necessary for human life.

It will be the collapse of the phytoplankton that will eliminate the the atmosphere necessary for human life.

Humans won’t be around to see the planet warm.

ahevia3• 5 years ago

This is unnecessary doomerism. Yes our situation is not exactly the brightest but is doomposting on HN really the best action you can take?

Humans will still be around to see the planet warm. The question is will individuals & society band together to limit that warming & adapt?

rc_mob• 5 years ago

First step to solving a problem is acknowledging that the problem exists. It feels like you have yet to take that first step.

adflux• 5 years ago

The main problem with doomtalk is the defeatist attitude that usually accompanies it. Utterly useless way of thinking

ripper1138• 5 years ago

Ridiculous. Humans burning fossil fuel for 200 years is nothing compared to the mass extinctions that have occurred in the past, and yet the atmosphere is still here.

gattilorenz• 5 years ago

The paper claims the opposite, instead of a collapse of phytoplakton there will (likely) be an increase:

Our study indicates that positive summer temperatures and a sufficient nutrient supply are key factors determining the present-day distribution of green snow algae on the Antarctic Peninsula. With the IPCC’s projected 1.5 °C global temperature increase, it is predicted that the 0 °C isotherm will increase in elevation and that positive degree days will become more commonplace and occur further to the south. This will likely open up new snow for colonisation by green snow algae, should an appropriate dispersal mechanism allow transfer to new areas. [...]
A warming Peninsula, therefore, may see a shift towards fewer, larger snow algae blooms, resulting in a significant increase in biomass on larger outlying islands and the mainland. The coupled loss of blooms from smaller islands would be insignificant with respect to biomass and may be mitigated by southward range expansion or an earlier growth season. However, with multiple and often unknown species recorded within patches of green snow algae, and little known about the dispersal mechanisms, life cycles and plasticity of snow algal species, losses from these islands could represent a reduction of terrestrial diversity for the Antarctic Peninsula.

civilized• 5 years ago

To anyone who is gearing up to doompost: the abstract says this is likely a negative feedback counteracting warming and carbon rise.

parksy4• 5 years ago

In which case I would have to take a step back and think about the world for a bit. Is there a possibility when it gets warmer / more carbon rich, the carbon-hungry microbes go to town, reducing temperatures (*eventually, maybe not over time periods important to humans?)

If the world's microbiome is geared to maintaining (rather than merely existing in / responding to) temperatures and atmospheric gas ratios within a fine margin that would be noteworthy.

I've probably drunk too much and it's too late at night for this conversation to be honest. I probably shouldn't have even pressed "reply".

ahevia3• 5 years ago

This is a good question! And it’s clear youre not asking this in bad faith (the line of thinking that CO2 is good for humanity & the planet is a common climate misinformation tactic)

I’m not an expert on this stuff but from what I’ve read over the course of millennium. The Earth will achieve balance again (assuming no further human intervention)

For all practical reasons that won’t work for us. Using microbes as a carbon removal solution is a real potential solution! Specifically using microbes in place of fertilizers as a technique to improve soil health (which would increase soil organic carbon). Although it’s not 100% clear how well that carbon will be stored for the long term.

I’m oversimplifying the science no doubt but we can harness microbes to our benefit.

shoto_io• 5 years ago

Good question. I think at the very least it shows that in a highly complex systems with many components unknown to us it is very difficult to predict the future. We shouldn’t stop trying though and update our models accordingly.

ChuckMcM• 5 years ago

You have touched on the property about systems that people don't really internalize well. When you're inside and part of a system and perturb it, the impact of the perturbation may activate parts of the system that you were unaware existed.

But it is also true that if you say, "Climate change is really only a big deal for the currently dominant flora and fauna, the planet as an ecosystem has been in many different states from ice ball to volcanic hell hole." :-) In geologic time it doesn't "matter" at all.

It is a good paper, and I've added it to the list of things that are changing that may influence climate changes (another is what happens with cloud formation when we have more moisture in the air due to rising atmospheric average temperatures, the IPCC model gives one result if we get more stratospheric clouds, and another if we get more clouds in the troposphere.)

labster2• 5 years ago

The thing is there are hundreds of negative and positive feedbacks, and they’re all modeled by people whose job is to think of these things. You are not going to think of something novel unless you are an expert in a related field. Your curiosity is not a bad thing. As a climatologist I’ve heard so many versions of “climate models don’t account for X” where X has been modeled since the 1980s that it just kind of triggers me.

The error bars of the IPCC report are our best guess on what we think we know about uncertainty. Sure, we could end up outside of it, on some heretofore unknown feedback, but it’s like betting our collective future on a longshot horse. The same applies to the assuming it will be much worse.

ravenstine• 5 years ago

Also, we aren't necessarily doomed if we were willing to actually try anything.

No one wants to try nuclear for reals because people are frightened of it and world governments don't have an economic interest in building more nuclear.

We don't have an equivalent of an "operation warp speed" for developing next-gen CO2 scrubbing technology. I guess that's just not as cool to people as building tunnels under LA or launching cars into space.

Speaking of algae, we're not turning wasteland into algae farming ponds and developing more useful algae because, well, I don't really know. Even with CRISPR-Cas9 being in relative infancy, GMO algae seems like a low hanging fruit for not only removing carbon from the atmosphere but being a food source in places around the world where food is scarce. I mean, as an individual you can buy a kit that has what you need to genetically modify yeast to glow with jellyfish genes, so how far off are we from making species like chlorella more practical? Maybe it's because nobody wants to eat pond scum.

All I know is that the amount of effort we are putting into these solutions, although there is some effort in each of them, really doesn't add up to the message we are being told about climate change. It's both extremely disappointing and cause for raised eyebrows.

webreac• 5 years ago

Nuclear is not dead: French President Emmanuel Macron announced a shift to small modular nuclear reactors https://www.france24.com/en/france/20211013-france-unveils-n...

pjc502• 5 years ago

The algae thing has been trialled; it turns out to have lots of fiddly little practical problems, and is reliant on fresh water like other farming. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3152439/

xyzzyz• 5 years ago

Speaking of algae, we're not turning wasteland into algae farming ponds and developing more useful algae because, well, I don't really know.

One of the reasons is that, according to many environmental activists, there is no such thing as “wasteland” that you could develop with minimal loss to environment. This is not a theoretical concern: read up on Ivanpah solar power plant, built in the middle of the literal desert, the place as deserving the designation of “wasteland” as any other place in the US. Activists forced the developers to spend tens of millions of dollars on relocating the desert tortoises living in that wasteland, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per tortoise - and that’s not even including the litigation costs. This also resulted in reduction of scope of the plant, reducing the total installed capacity, and reducing the amount of carbon-free energy we will get out of it.

The lesson here is that if the environmental activists are not happy about building solar power plant in the middle of remote desert, they won’t be happy about building literally anything else. They’re totally BANANAs: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.

hummel• 5 years ago

I'm working on this direction, with an very specific seaweed that solve this problem now and doesn't need freshwater or fertilizers. If anyone is interested reach me on my profile.

moffkalast2• 5 years ago

No one wants to try nuclear for reals because people are frightened of it and world governments don't have an economic interest in building more nuclear

Well it's also worth noting that it's become like that because of the oil lobby's decades of scaremongering and the oversupply of natural gas which makes those plants the most profitable choice.

But still it's mostly a NIMBY problem. If smaller, mass produced, gen 4 reactors could be set up in some uninhabited areas we'd basically solve all that.

bertil• 5 years ago

Also, we aren't necessarily doomed if we were willing to actually try anything.

I maintain that, given how the majority of tax rebates and financial aid is still going to fossil fuels, unless we kick people out of that option for good, they will latch to the last dollar of subsidy or political donation until human life on Earth is beyond hope. The only way to kickstart changes and investments is to put executives in front a judge for the mass murders that are already well documented and be clear that they will be held responsible for the millions of deaths related to unusual climate events.

How did we stop populist from legally raising to position of power against after the 1940s? Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. Climate disruption is a much bigger threat and needs a gesture at least as big.

hiidrew• 5 years ago

Thought this was referring to remote viewing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing) for a second haha

billiam• 5 years ago

While this paper is interesting for identifying an interesting relatively unstudied carbon sink, I am confident no one on this website, including me, is in a good position to understand all the implications of it. I found the conclusions to be pretty complex and speculative. All in all, all it shows is that we have no idea what's going to happen and when.

_3u103• 5 years ago

The report says the total biomass is 1300 tonnes. (1.3x10^3). I think the algae might be less important than the authors are letting on.

Robotbeat• 5 years ago

Seems to me that darkening the snow would be a much bigger impact than the very small amount of carbon in the algae.

schiffern• 5 years ago

terran

Could we please not alter headlines to replace real words with made-up scifi words? The original headline uses "terrestrial," which is correct.

Also even in the context of scifi, "terrestrial" has a completely different meaning ("of the land surface", vs "of the planet Earth").

Inb4 'all words are made up' etc etc boring thread

Mods, can we get a fix?

EDIT: Thanks!

grzm• 5 years ago

The article title is "Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important terrestrial carbon sink", which is over the 80-character limit for titles. The submitter likely made the edit to make the title fit.

If you have better alternative, feel free to suggest one.

Edit to add: the best way to get a title fixed is to (quietly) email the mods using the contact link in the footer.

burnished2• 5 years ago

Drop the word 'green', its an interesting descriptor but accuracy wouldn't be lost in the same way (I believe).

shrimp_emoji• 5 years ago

Inb4 'all words are made up' etc etc boring thread

You admit your point is baseless but haven't internalized it emotionally, I guess.

"Terra" is "Earth" in Latin, and "teren" is Romanian for "ground". Can't "terran" be a shorthand for "terrESTRIAL" in English just because it's the name of a faction in StarCraft?

amelius• 5 years ago

I wonder if, instead of scrubbing CO2, it would make sense to increase the other constituents of air, e.g. oxygen, thereby reducing the effective concentration of CO2. What if we ran a giant hydrolysis operation, generating O2 (and letting H2 escape into space or finding some other use for it other than burning it)?

dexwiz• 5 years ago

Assuming you could make a sizable contribution, extra gas would eventually dissipate into space. That said, oxygen is high in potential chemical energy (usually contributes energy to a reaction, hence everything oxidizes), while CO2 is low (doesn’t react with much without external energy like sunlight). This the process of making oxygen or using (storing) CO2 are roughly equivalent energy wise. Of course processes and catalyst may change the exact numbers, but you aren’t getting around the basic thermo problem.

snewman2• 5 years ago

This doesn't work. First of all, you'd still have the same mass of CO2, so the insulating effect wouldn't change. Those molecules would still be there to interfere with infrared radiation trying to escape into space.

Second of all, you're talking about gargantuan quantities of oxygen (or nitrogen, or whatever). CO2 is roughly 1/2500 of the atmosphere, so to achieve a given amount of dilution, you can remove one CO2 molecule or add 2500 other molecules.

Finally, I don't know what the side effects of increasing global air pressure would be, but I'm sure there would be significant effects!

mrpopo• 5 years ago

Just adding an incredibly larger amount of gases (the atmosphere is 5.5 * 10^18 kg) in the air doesn't increase global air pressure, it will just make more gases leak into the outer atmosphere over time. I am not sure how long that would take though.

Anyway, as you said, any project that doesn't involve significantly scaling down anthropic GHG emissions and human settlement footprint will have significant effects. Planting trillions of trees will result in dead trees and environments destroyed. CCS at scale will involve ungodly amounts of energy + materials. Algae farming will alter the ocean's biodiversity already affected by warming + acidity + overfishing.

It's time to acknowledge that the Earth doesn't owe us a couple of large cars per household, exotic foods, meat BBQs and regular plane trips.

Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

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