A INTRODUCTION TO THE GLOBAL CARBON C（介绍了全球碳C）.pdfVIP

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE GLOBAL CARBON CYCLE Carbon: the building block of life. You may have heard this phrase, but have you fully considered what it really means? All living things are made of elements, the most abundant of which are, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorous. Of these, carbon is the best at joining with other elements to form compounds necessary for life, such as sugars, starches, fats, and proteins. Together, all these forms of carbon account for approximately half of the total dry mass of living things. Carbon is also present in the Earths atmosphere, soils, oceans, and crust. When viewing the Earth as a system, these components can be referred to as carbon pools (sometimes also called stocks or reservoirs) because they act as storage houses for large amounts of carbon. Any movement of carbon between these reservoirs is called a flux . In any integrated system, fluxes connect reservoirs together to create cycles and feedbacks. An example of such a cycle is seen in Figure 1 where, carbon in the atmosphere is used in photosynthesis to create new plant material. On a global basis, this processes transfers large amounts of carbon from one pool (the atmosphere) to another (plants). Over time, these plants die and decay, are harvested by humans, or are burned either for energy or in wildfires. All of these processes are fluxes that can cycle carbon among various pools within ecosystems and eventually releases it back to the atmosphere. Viewing the Earth as a whole, individual cycles like this are linked to others involving oceans