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New research shows that global warming will cause the world's soil to release carbon.
Scientists used data on more than 9000 soil samples from around the world to find that carbon storagedeclines strongly as average temperatures increase.
Global warming causes more carbon to be released into the atmosphere, which in turn causes climate change.
The amount of carbon that could be released depends on the soil type, with coarse-textured soils losing three times as much carbon as fine-textured soils.
The researchers from the University of Exeter and the University of Stockholm say that their findings help to identify vulnerable carbon stocks and give an opportunity to improve Earth System Models.
Professor Iain Hartley of the College of Life and Environmental Sciences said that releasing a small amount of carbon could have a significant impact on the climate.
The most vulnerable to climate change are the coarse-textured soils at high latitudes.
The high rates of warming taking place in cooler regions may require particular attention to such stores.
In tropical areas, we found carbon stores in fine-textured soils to be less vulnerable to climate warming.
The data on the 9,300 soil profiles came from the World Soil Information database.
The likely impact of global warming was estimated by comparing carbon storage in places with different average temperatures.
The average carbon storage fell by more than 25% when the temperature increased.
Professor Hartley said that even bleak forecasts do not anticipate this level of warming, but that they used this scale to give them confidence that the effects they observed were caused by temperature rather than other variables.
Our results show that carbon is released from the soil as temperatures rise.
The study did not examine the timescales involved, and more research is needed to investigate how much carbon could be released this century.
The results could not be represented by an established ESM.
Professor Hartley said that this suggests that there is an opportunity to use the patterns we have observed to improve how models represent soils.
The ability of microbes to access and digest carbon-based organic material is affected by the soil texture.
The temperature effects on carbon storage are controlled by the soil.
The temperature effects on carbon storage are controlled by the soil. There is a DOI titled " 10.1038/s41467-021-27101-1".
Nature Communications is a journal.
The study was retrieved from thephys.org on 18 November 2021.
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