Friday, January 23, 2009

Sea bed provides information about present climatic change

Innovations Report (Germany): ...Although gases in the atmosphere tell us about this greenhouse effect, oceans have accumulated information for million years which allow us a better understanding of this phenomenon. The past lets us know the present. In this process, which involves a better knowledge of carbon cycle in the sea, David Gallego Torres developed the research work "Acumulación y preservación de materia orgánica en sedimentos marinos: implicaciones en los ciclos del carbono y nutrientes" (Accumulation and preservation of organic matter in marine sediments: implications in the cycles of carbon and nutrients), under the supervision of Professors Francisca Martínez Ruiz and Miguel Ortega Huertas of the University of Granada (Andalusian Institute of Earth Sciences, CEAMA and Department of Mineralogy and Petrology).
"Oceans may act as a drain of carbon, in the way of inorganic carbonates or as organic matter settled in sediments", says Gallego Torres, who did research, among other phenomena, into the accumulation of organic matter in the geological past (Plioceno-Holoceno), in the East of the Mediterranean.

...Doctor David Gallego Torres says that one of the main conclusions of his research is that "climatic fluctuations affect the marine environment in such a way that there may be a carbon taking by organic matter, due to these changes in marine environment’s oceanography, in such a way that the organic matter would remain accumulated again in the earth’s crust of sediments and would remain there for a while"…

The Atlantic Trench, US Geological Survey

No comments: