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Carbon cycling

The mysterious missing sink

Nature volume 398, pages 105–107 (1999)Cite this article

I can remember discussing the implications of early data1 on atmospheric CO2 almost 30 years ago. Geochemists were confident that uptake of carbon at the ocean's surface could explain the imbalance between carbon released by man's activities (then considered to be almost entirely the burning of fossil fuels) and measured concentrations in the atmosphere. The rather large seasonal oscillation was regarded as a terrestrial signal, but one that remained in balance from year to year. Studies in the 1970s and 1980s, however, showed that both of these assumptions were incorrect. Detailed surface carbon-flux measurements were made at many sites in the world's oceans and, as fluxes for different regions became more precisely known, estimated average fluxes dwindled. In 1990, Tans et al.2 announced that the annual flux to the oceans was likely to be less than 0.5 × 1015 g of carbon per year — a quarter the amount necessary to balance the global carbon budgets.

So where is the ‘missing sink’ for atmospheric CO2 ? On page 145 of this issue, Nadelhoffer et al.3 provide convincing evidence that, just as it cannot be explained by the oceans, neither can the missing carbon be rationalized by uptake in the northern temperate forests — until now, the favoured theory.

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Figure 1: The global carbon whodunnit — where is the missing sink? The possibility of a single culprit has been all but dismissed by Nadelhoffer et al.3.

MOUNTAIN HIGH MAPS/DIGITAL WISDOM, INC.

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  1. The Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, T6G 2E9, Alberta, Canada

    David W. Schindler

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Schindler, D. The mysterious missing sink. Nature 398, 105–107 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/18111

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