land area

Finding peatlands

May 15, 2025 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Peatlands are a special kind of wetland that have enormous potential for helping to mitigate climate change. They are great at capturing carbon because their constantly soggy soils deprive decomposer organisms of the oxygen they need to break down dead plants. Living plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and incorporate the carbon into their tissues. When plants die, decomposers like bacteria digest the plant matter and release the carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz found that the average per-area carbon densities in peatlands in Colombia are four to ten times higher than those in the Amazon rainforest. This agrees with other studies around the world. On a global scale, peatlands cover only 3% of land areas but store more carbon than all the world’s trees. Peatlands are unsung heroes helping to reduce the impact of fossil fuel emissions.

Peatlands can only store carbon if they remain constantly wet. When they are drained for agriculture or other development, decomposer organisms get back to work digesting organic matter and releasing carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

A major challenge in protecting peatland is finding them. They are often hard to distinguish from other types of wetlands.

The Santa Cruz researchers have been identifying and locating peatlands in Colombia, where decades of civil war had made many parts of the country inaccessible for research. Finding and protecting peatlands there and in many other places around the world is an important task in the battle against climate change.

**********

Web Links

Colombia’s peatlands could be a crucial tool to fight climate change. But first we have to find them.

Photo, posted January 2, 2018, courtesy of Roni Ziade / U.S. Forest Service via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Svalbard is melting

September 10, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole. It is one of the world’s northernmost inhabited areas and is a popular attraction for tourists. Svalbard is famous for rugged, remote terrain of glaciers and frozen tundra sheltering polar bears, Svalbard reindeer, and Arctic foxes. The Northern Lights are visible during winter, and its summer features the “midnight sun”—sunlight 24 hours a day. It is the home of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which provides safe, free, and long-term storage of seed duplicates from all gene banks and nations around the world.

Over half of Svalbard’s land area is covered with ice and accounts for about 6% of the planet’s glaciated area outside of Greenland and Antarctica. But Svalbard is also one of the fastest-warming places on Earth.

It has suffered extreme episodes of melting this summer, brought on by exceptionally high air temperatures. In late July and early August, temperatures hovered around 7 degrees Fahrenheit above average for this part of the Arctic Circle, causing snow and ice to rapidly melt.

According to scientists, Svalbard’s ice caps broke their all-time record for daily surface melt on July 23rd, shedding nearly half a foot of water equivalent that day, a rate five times larger than normal.

On August 11th, the high temperature in Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s capital city, reached 68 degrees, the highest August temperature on record and 4 degrees above the previous monthly record. Svalbard experienced its warmest summer on record in 2023.

**********

Web Links

Svalbard Melts

Photo, posted September 21, 2016, courtesy of Christopher Michel via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Oases and desertification

May 21, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Oases are important sources of water for people, plants, and animals in the world’s desert areas. In fact, oases sustain 10% of the world’s population despite taking up only about 1.5% of land area. They form when groundwater flows and settles into low-lying areas or when surface meltwater flows down from nearby mountains and pools.

New research from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has found that oases added 85,000 square miles of new area from 1995 to 2020, mostly from artificial expansion projects, but over the same period lost 52,000 square miles from desertification and water scarcity. The net gain of 33,000 square miles is not considered to be sustainable given that it was mostly due to artificial causes. The oasis expansion projects were in Asia but losses due to desertification were also mostly in Asia.

Today, oases are found in 37 countries. Increases in oases mostly come from people intentionally converting desert land into oases using runoff water and groundwater pumping, creating grasslands and croplands. This mostly has taken place in China.

Human over-exploitation of dwindling groundwater can limit the sustainability of oases as can the long-term loss of glaciers.

The study highlighted ways to sustain healthy oases, including suggestions for improving water resource management, promoting sustainable land use and management, and encouraging water conservation and efficient water use. As the climate continues to change, these efforts will be increasingly important for a significant portion of the world’s population.

**********

Web Links

World’s Oases Threatened By Desertification, Even As Humans Expand Them

Photo, posted August 3, 2008, courtesy of Paul Williams via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Wind farms and land use

May 20, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Wind power has become one of the most affordable ways to generate electricity as well as being renewable and not contributing to global warming. But there has been the perception that wind farms require a lot of land compared with fossil fuel power plants. This issue of land use has made decision-makers reluctant to invest in wind energy in many instances.

A new study by McGill University in Montreal looked at this issue and has found that land use for wind power is far more efficient than previously thought. The study combined data from geographic information systems with machine learning models to assess land usage associated with nearly 16,000 wind turbines in the western U.S.

The study assessed the land use of 320 wind farms. They found that wind power infrastructure (mostly the turbines themselves and the roads that lead to them) typically only uses 5% of the land area of a wind farm. If the wind farm is sited in locations with existing infrastructure, such as on agricultural land, then it can be as much as seven times more land-efficient – meaning the amount energy produced in a given area of land impacted by the infrastructure – than a wind farm that is developed on unused land.

Previous studies of wind farm land usage assumed that all of the land where the wind farm was located was devoted to energy generation. In reality, most of land in question is often used for other purposes, such as agriculture.

The methods developed by the researchers are potentially useable for future assessments of various energy technologies in terms of their environmental sustainability.

**********

Web Links

Clearing the air: wind farms more land efficient than previously thought

Photo, posted September 29, 2009, courtesy of Tim Green via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio