Seminario de Investigación IMAB: SEQUESTRATION OF ATMOSPHERIC CARBON DIOXIDE AS INORGANIC CARBON UNDER SEMI-ARID FORESTS

Por Murray Moinester

El próximo Miércoles 11 de Septiembre, se celebra a las 12h en la sala de conferencias del edificio Jerónimo de Ayanz de la UPNA el Seminario de Investigación del IMAB titulado: "SEQUESTRATION OF ATMOSPHERIC CARBON DIOXIDE AS INORGANIC CARBON UNDER SEMI-ARID FORESTS"

Resumen: 

Studies in Israel’s semi-arid Yatir forest tracked atmospheric CO2 transiting the soil. Bicarbonates, originating from tree root exhalation, are depleted and incorporated within the unsaturated zone (USZ) as CaCO3 calcite. The calcite deposition rate corresponds to 22 mg CO2 per year per liter of sediment. It stays in place long term and does not re-dissolve in low rainfall semi-arid regions. These regions comprise ~24 million square kilometers worldwide. We extrapolate to these regions, taking 6m as the global average depth of root respiration, and assuming that Yatir is representative. Therefore, roughly 3 billion tons of CO2 could potentially be precipitated globally each year in the USZ as calcite, following global semi-arid forestation. This represents ~15% of the present annual increase of 20 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. We plan next to take additional data in other semi-arid forests to bolster our data basis

Dr. Murray Moinester is a Tel Aviv University Emeritus Professor of Physics. He carried out cooperative research projects in experimental high-energy particle physics at accelerator laboratories in Israel, Canada, France, Switzerland and USA. He published some 225 articles in refereed journals. Presently, he works in the fields of Archaeology via Infrared Imaging & Scientific Dating, and Soil Science related to Carbon Sequestration.

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