The Potential of Upper Ocean Alkalinity Controls for Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
Date: Friday, September 30 @ 09:30:00 MDT
Topic: Impacts of High CO2 on Ecosystems


by Christoph Heinze

Extreme global model scenarios of complete preservation and degradation of biogenic particulate CaCO3 (calcium carbonate) in open ocean waters which are supersaturated with respect to CaCO3 were carried out. According to these experiments, the theoretical potential of upper ocean alkalinity controls for changing the atmospheric pCO2 (CO2 partial pressure) amounts to several hundred μatm on time scales of several 104 years. Up to a timescale of 103 years, however, the respective influence is minor as compared to an expected anthropogenic increase of the atmospheric pCO2 in the order of 500-1000 μatm.

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This article comes from The 7th International CO2 Conference Web Site
http://icdc7.cmdl.noaa.gov/

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