Could Glaciers be the Answer to Global Warming?
By now, the word “carbon based life form” has been taken too far by people. This word, however, did not give anyone the right to keep adding carbon to the environment in the form of carbon-dioxide, carbon-monoxide and other carbon based greenhouse gases. The fundamental problem here being, we still feel that this doesn’t affect us. At a time where climate awareness and climate action is at its peak, we tend to get caught up in our own lives and don’t realise that our individual contribution to the environment adds up to cause a huge environmental impact.
But here’s some surprising news! From the glaciers of Canada’s high Arctic, researchers have found that the northern rivers secretly pulled carbon-dioxide from the environment at a rate faster than rainforests. These findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and they have completely changed the understanding of rivers, which were viewed as sources of carbon emissions.
In temperate rivers, where one would find a lot more of organic life in the form of animal and plant life, the decomposition rates are much higher. This is why these bodies of water emit far more amounts of carbon-dioxide than they absorb. But this is not the case with glacial rivers. They are made of silt and are very cold which makes it difficult for aquatic life to survive. This means that they are less vulnerable to organic decomposition and are able to absorb a lot more carbon-dioxide.
When fine sediments from the glaciers, including silicates and carbonates, get scraped and mix with the water, they begin a process called chemical weathering. “The mixing together creates these reactions and puts all these different particles together. That’s where we see that the net result is the sink of carbon dioxide.” This chemical weathering process helps in removing carbon-dioxide which is over 42 kms away. This means that these glacial rivers absorbs 40 times the amount of carbon when compared to the Amazon rainforests.
“In a rapidly changing climate, these findings provide a surprisingly optimistic message: there are often unseen or underappreciated ways in which the planet regulates carbon emissions. It shows just how little we know about these systems,” said one of the researchers working on these findings, St Pierre.
But here’s a catch with this situation. We have just now found out that glaciers help in removing carbon from the environment but we have been hearing for many years now, that our glaciers are melting and thus increasing the sea levels. This means that even though this is an amazing finding, we sadly cannot completely rely on it.
“Glaciers are a finite resource. The waters that emanate from them are also a finite resource. And we’re potentially losing something that we’re deriving a lot of benefits from, before we actually fully understand it,” said St Pierre.
There is a need to strengthen the resilience of our environment to climate related hazards and natural disasters as per the Sustainable Development Goal 13. But with rising greenhouse gas emissions, climate change is occurring at rates much faster than anticipated and its effects are clearly felt worldwide. This means that there is no way in which we can really rely on just forests and glaciers to reduce the emissions that we have created. We need to actively take steps to create this kind of change.
Here, it is important to note that the Earth will heal itself in one way or another, but we are the ones who are at stake. These findings show us the importance of science and how it is essential that we make the best of our creative minds to innovate to save ourselves. Start your journey towards a better tomorrow with a single click at aiesec.org.
