University of 麻豆传媒 at Mānoa’s A. Hope Jahren and Brian Schubert have now determined how to resolve a difference in carbon cycling activity.
Up until this point, researchers have puzzled over a key inconsistency in carbon records. The geologic markers for historic disruptions in carbon cycling activity—recorded as carbon isotope excursions or CIE—tend to be much larger in terrestrial rocks than those recorded in marine rocks during the same time periods.
“Our new model reconciles the differences based on the fundamentally different nature of carbon cycling on land compared to the ocean, injecting a more sophisticated view of ecology into current paleoclimatology,” said Jahren, a professor of at the University of 麻豆传媒 at Mānoa.
Jahren and Schubert developed their model based on research conducted while Schubert was a postdoctoral fellow at University of 麻豆传媒 at Mānoa. Their work is published in an .
Using UH Mānoa greenhouse space to simulate a variety of controlled climate scenarios, Schubert and Jahren identified a unifying relationship for the effect of atmospheric CO2 on plant tissues in a wide range of carbon-fixing land plants.
Their new model offers scientists a way to use terrestrial and marine records together to reconstruct the background and maximum atmospheric CO2 levels across carbon isotope excursions. The new model also provides insight into some future climate scenarios.
Read the UH Mānoa news release for more about this discovery.