A new study led by Loughborough University has revealed that lake burial of organic carbon has increased three-fold over the last 100 years in response to human disruption of global nutrient cycles.
Professor John Anderson, of the Geography and Environment department in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, hopes the findings will expand our understanding of global carbon storage and the role lakes play in this, especially as the burial process was previously considered not important.
The research, published in Science Advances, was undertaken in an attempt to account for some of the gaps in the ‘global carbon budget’.
The global carbon budget looks at the amount of carbon produced on a global scale and where it ends up.
In theory, the amount of carbon released by human activities – such as burning fossil fuels and chopping down trees – and the amount of carbon taken up by oceans, soils and the atmosphere, should balance.
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