Clipping of news on Brazilian Culture, Law and Citizenship
08/08/2012
This article was translated by an automatic translation system, and was therefore not reviewed by people.
Plants studied were 80,000 times more methane than normal level.
Gas found contributes to climate change and greenhouse gases.
Diseased trees may be generating methane, a gas blamed for global warming, scientists from Yale University in the United States. They surveyed 60 plants in the forest of Yale Meyers, in the northeastern state of Connecticut, and found gas concentrations 80,000 times higher than normal.
In ordinary conditions, the presence of methane is less than two parts per million in the atmosphere. In the hollow parts of trees patients, researchers found average levels of 15 thousand parts per million of methane in the air.
The research was published in the journal "Geophysical Research Letters" ("Letters of Geophysical Research," in the English translation). The concentration of methane in the trees sick enough to be flammable, according to the study coordinator, Kristofer Covey, Yale University.
The researcher points out that the conditions found in the trees are normal in many places of the forest in the world, which indicates that scientists may have found a new source of production of methane "on a global scale."
Trees patients have a global warming potential equivalent to 18% of carbon sequestered by the same forests, reducing the benefit that they would create climate in about a fifth, second Covey.
"If we extrapolate what was found in the study for forests on a global scale, methane produced by trees represent 10% of the world's emissions," said Xuhui Lee, co-author and professor of meteorology at Yale. He acknowledges that scientists "did not know about" this process of creating the methane.
Older
Trees that produce methane are older and sick, aged between 80 and 100 years. In the case of forest Yale, they are being affected by a fungus that creates favorable conditions for the proliferation of microorganisms that produce gas.
Nobody had thought that the idea of fruit rot fungi, a common problem in forests, could be linked to the production of greenhouse gases and global warming, the scientists emphasize.
Source: G1 News
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This article was translated by an automatic translation system, and was therefore not reviewed by people.