LONDON July 28. 2024 (Saba) - An international team of environmental scientists has discovered that the bark of many types of trees absorbs methane from the atmosphere, making forests a sink for this gas, not a source of it.
The Russian news agency "TASS" quoted today, Sunday, the press office of the University of Birmingham, England, as saying: The Earth's trees absorb up to 49 million tons of methane from the air per year.
Professor Vincent Gauss from the university said: "We have long assumed that the main contribution of trees to the Earth's carbon cycle is that they absorb carbon dioxide and convert it into biomass, but our observations have shown that plants at least affect the Earth's climate in another way, which we had not thought of before."
The researchers found that the trees themselves do not absorb methane, but rather through colonies of methane-feeding bacteria living on the surface of the bark, where they absorb methane from the air, oxidize it and convert it into biomass and carbon dioxide, which has a much less impact on the climate than the original hydrocarbon. The researchers link the rapid absorption of methane by the bark of tropical trees to the acceleration of microbial metabolism in the warm and humid climate of Brazil and Panama.
According to scientists' estimates, the bark of all the Earth's trees combined absorbs 25-49 million tons of methane, which increases the beneficial contribution of plants to combating global warming by about ten percent.
The researchers recommended taking these findings into account when predicting climate change in the coming decades, as well as when developing measures to use agriculture to accelerate the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
J.A
resource : SABA
| more of (International) |