The Carbon Cycle - final, sorry
This activity from NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory introduces students to the scientific understanding of the greenhouse effect and the carbon cycle. The activity leads them through several interactive tasks to investigate recent trends in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Students analyze scientific data and use scientific reasoning to determine the causes responsible for these recent trends. By studying carbon cycle science in a visual and interactive manner, students can learn firsthand about the reasons behind our changing climate. The CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness. Read what our review team had to say about this resource below or learn more about how CLEAN reviews teaching materials. The Carbon Cycle.The Carbon Cycle Video
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Before beginning the lab, please watch the short video below. Mila is going to introduce the carbon cycle, show you how The Carbon Cycle use Google Earth in this lab, and then end her video by reminding you of the three main questions you should be able Cabon answer at the end of the lab. You learned in the troposphere lab that carbon dioxide CO 2 makes up about 0. As you have hopefully deduced by looking at the title of the lab, the name of the cycle is the carbon cycle.
Earth’s Carbon Cycle
Carbon is constantly being moved around the Earth through the processes that make up the Carbon Cycle. This lab is concerned with the different processes comprising the carbon cycle, but its importance goes beyond just becoming familiar with the various ways that carbon is transformed and transported around the globe. That is because the lab also is focused The Carbon Cycle how human activity can influence those processes — and potentially influence the weather and climate on the planet.
Entering with the right mindset Throughout this lab you will be asked to answer some questions. Those questions will come in three different varieties:. That answer will be based on information 1 presented by your instructor, 2 found in background sections, or 3 determined by you from data, graphs, pictures, etc.
There is more of an expectation of you just click for source a certain answer for a question of this type as compared to questions of the other types. There is still an The Carbon Cycle that Chcle answer will match up to a certain response, but you should feel comfortable in expressing your understanding of how these different ideas fit together. A Ccle like this will ask you to speculate about why something is the way it is, for instance. There is not one certain answer to a question of this type.
In any matter cycle, the substance at the heart of that cycle e. In the biosphere, carbon is found in the form of organic Chcle trapped in living organisms and in the soil; in the lithosphere, it is held in carbonate rocks and other materials like coal; and in the hydrosphere it dissolves in the water to form carbonic acid. The picture below shows the global carbon budget for This is article source way of tabulating the The Carbon Cycle of carbon in billions of tons that is released by carbon sources and absorbed by carbon sinks.
Q1: Identify two sources of carbon in the picture. Identify The Carbon Cycle sinks. Look at the picture below that focuses on that portion: the exchange of carbon between the atmosphere and the biosphere. As noted above, most of the carbon atoms in the atmosphere are nestled in between two oxygen atoms in the form of CO 2. Green plants can take in that CO 2combine it with water H 2 O and make carbohydrates literally, hydrated carbon through the process of photosynthesis. It is through that process that plants grow and gain mass. While it may be hard to imagine that plants get their mass from water and an invisible gas in the air, the time-lapse photograph of wheat-grass growing may make that more believable.
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Q3: From where is the wheat-grass getting the carbon that is enabling it to grow? Now, there are a lot of ways that this carbon in the carbohydrates can The Carbon Cycle released back into the atmosphere. Both plants and the animals who eat them can break the carbohydrates mostly the sugar glucose Cyce down into water and carbon dioxide, getting some useful energy out of the process, and releasing the CO 2 through Crisis Hiring. Also, fungi and bacteria can break down the carbon compounds in dead plants and animals and convert the carbon to CO 2 if oxygen is present.
Finally, combustion which is really the same process as respiration, except that it involves burning fuels instead of foods can oxidize the organic carbon-containing materials in plants back to CO 2. One form of combustion that you ran across in a previous lab The Troposphere was slash and burnwhich is used to clear out large areas of forest for agriculture and is thus a major cause of deforestation. Q4: People have concerns about the use of slash and burn partly because it affects the The Carbon Cycle cycle in multiple ways.
What are two of those ways? Think about the process of slashing and burning and the change it The Carbon Cycle to the landscape. Take a look at the picture below that focuses on the processes The Carbon Cycle in this exchange. You can see from the picture above that some of the same processes — photosynthesis and respiration — are part of the exchange between these two parts of the global ecosystem. There is another mechanism by which the oceans can act as both a carbon sink and a carbon source: the water in the ocean can absorb carbon dioxide leading to acidification of the ocean water and, like a soda going flat, release it through the agitation caused by ocean currents. Q5: How did the amount of carbon absorbed by the hydrosphere compare to the amount carbon released by the hydrosphere in ?
There is one last portion of the carbon cycle on The Effects Of Networking In we want to focus. Before we do so, though, it is important for us to remember that the carbon cycle represents a global systemso even though we have looked at the cycle in manageable portions, we have to remember that the processes in each portion are interrelated and any change in one process produces changes in the others.]
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