FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 12, 2008

Deserts may hold key to carbon dioxide issue
DRI study in Mojave Desert suggests deserts may be slowing global carbon dioxide rise

LAS VEGAS - An ongoing study by Desert Research Institute researchers may indicate that deserts are absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than previously thought.

DRI scientists Lynn Fenstermaker of Las Vegas and Jay Arnone of Reno, together with their colleague Georg Wohlfahrt of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, have just published their initial findings in the journal Global Change Biology. This work has just been highlighted in the Nature Publishing Group's online journal "Nature Reports Climate Change."

Web link to report: http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0805/full/climate.2008.34.html.

"We are excited by the results presented in this paper, which demonstrate that deserts are a larger sink for carbon dioxide than had previously been assumed," Fenstermaker said.

Fenstermaker, Arnone and their DRI colleague Richard Jasoni are trying to track the fate of all this absorbed carbon in a new study on surface soil biotic crusts. Preliminary results indicate that cyanobacteria, lichens and mosses living on the soil surface are a possible significant Mojave Desert carbon sink. They anticipate completing that study this summer with a final set of measurements under more extreme conditions.

"Our results indicate that if all the desert ecosystems in the world--which together make up more than 30 percent of Earth's land surface--are taking up carbon dioxide at the same rate as our Mojave Desert site, then the amount of carbon dioxide taken up each year would match the amount emitted to the atmosphere globally through burning of fossil fuels (about 6-7 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year)." Arnone said. "Another way to look at this is, without deserts, the annual rate of anthropogenic carbon dioxide rise might be twice as rapid as it is presently and might therefore promote more rapid global warming?"

By combining measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide and vertical wind speed, they quantified the net carbon dioxide consumed by the ecosystem's biomass, from shrubs to microscopic organisms living in the soil. The annual removal of the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere at the research site was upwards of 100 grams of carbon per square meter, on par with some temperate forests, with the majority being consumed during the spring months.

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