Carbon

Carbon is more than life’s master builder. Civilization is built on a carbon foundation, one much wider than just the global combustion of fossil fuels. Living thing sand inanimate objects are more similar than they appear. For example, plastic is not just what soda bottles are made of. Plastic are polymers, chains of repeating units, whether they are found on tortoise shells or tortoiseshell sunglass frames, in chickens or rubber chickens. Chemists point out that nylon is a polyamide, like proteins, but it is composed of a single repeated synthetic amino acid. “We are all of us, warehouses of natural plastics.” A specialist in plastics once wrote driven by his wife’s cancer to see the tragic similarities between chemical degradation and illness.

Carbon is so instrumental to life – and has always been – it’s tempting to say that every age, from the foggy beginning, has been one of carbon. Yet only one get to wear the name tag. The Carboniferous period, which spans from 359 million to 299 million years ago, earned its name from massive burial of coal forming organic carbon. During that period there was a great accumulation of atmospheric oxygen. Woody trees with leaves thrived during the Carboniferous. Their roots altered earth and accelerated the erosion of rocks, sweeping carbon and minerals to the sea, settled to the seafloor. As erosion drew terrestrial carbon away, the plants and trees continued to exchange molecular oxygen (O2) taken from water in return for airborne carbon dioxide (CO2). Tall, scaly trees grew old and fell into bog, hiding their carbon underground, where it stayed until the coal industry began unearthing it some three hundred years ago – seconds in geological time.

Carbon structures life. Oxygen ignites it. Evolution in the Carboniferous entered a period of experimentation that wrought 175-foot, scaly trees with long floppy leaves, and dragonflies with 30-inch wingspans, a world we might recognize only as science fiction. Today’s carbon age is the Carboniferous period in reverse – coal-filtered power plants burn long-buried carbon back into the atmosphere, recombining carbon and oxygen into CO2. Your car is doing the same thing. Gasoline is refined from petroleum and leached from source rocks much more “recently” than the Carboniferous. Most oil became trapped in its underground vaults within the last 90 million years. Not surprisingly, the rise in carbon dioxide associated with global warming is accompanies by (nonthreatening) decline in the amount of atmospheric oxygen.

We have recently become carbon conscious, trying to measure our “carbon footprint” as if it were a shoe size. That’s fitting, since we are now trying to manage carbon in a way it has never been managed before – a direct consequence of mismanagement. Our carbon age is market most visibly by rational human attempts to wrestle the Earth’s geochemical cycle back from the brink, after two centuries of burning hydrocarbon minerals in industry.

First, the Earth’s temperature and the carbon content of the atmosphere are correlated one very geological time scale. When temperature goes up, carbon goes up. When temperature goes down, carbon goes down. That’s usually the sequence of events – first temperature, then carbon – until industrialization, when scientists know that the reverse is true.

The geological record suggests that life has always helped regulate the carbon content of the atmosphere, even though geophysical forces predominate over large timescales. Humans can lay claim to being the speediest, and if trends continue, the most self-destructive regulators of climate. Carbon flows through the atmosphere – by mass of tiny fraction of the global cycle – which is frequently thought of as the flow of carbon through living things, the atmosphere, oceans, land, and from hydrocarbon minerals. These are not static categories, “stove pipes” cut off from each other. They are natural conveyers that converge, forge new directions, and vary their speed. The atmosphere is a (geologically) short term way station for carbon atoms passing out of living tissue, the high seas, or terra firma.

Instead of think about the world in old fashioned static subject categories, such as “climate,” “geology,” “marine chemistry,” or “biology,” non-scientists might think of the behavior of carbon from the molecular to glob al scales, as “carbon science.” Instead of keeping track of confusing boundary, distinction among scientific discipline, just scrub them, and follow the carbon.

Science is a curiosity-led, puzzle-solving enterprise. Physical evidence and critical reasoning bring advances in knowledge and the technologies that underpin our lifestyle. Great and aspiring scientists attack the world through the “scientific method,” a tool for logical thought applicable far beyond the laboratory, even if it’s rarely acknowledged beyond the schoolroom. Scientists organize their findings in a hierarchy of knowledge. Confirmed observations are “facts” – trivial but essential bricks in the larger edifice. Accumulated facts can point to broad patterns within nature. As they begin to make sense together, they might suggest a “hypothesis,” which generate testable predictions about the phenomenon under study. A hypothesis that passes many experimental tests can become a scientific “law,” which reliably predicts how a phenomenon behaves. A law may be elevated to the highest echelon of scientific knowledge – “theory” – when its explanatory power reveals fundamental working of nature.

Homo sapiens is not the first species to hobble a period of stability. But a look at how the Earth works leads to the conclusion that we are changing it faster than ever before, as never before. Scientists distinguish between short-term and long-term carbon cycles. The short-term cycle lasts hours, years, or millennia, and described carbon’s path through life, waters, soil, and air. The long-term carbon cycle adds another leg to the path, the Earth’s crust. When material settled to the ground or ocean floor, and stays there, carbon travel can halt for millions or tens of millions of years. Carbon can remain underground for 200 million or 300 million years, or longer, until a volcano or undersea vent blows it back to the surface system, mostly as carbon dioxide. As a geological phenomenon, human civilization short-circuits the long-term and short-term carbon cycles.

In our carbon age, economic activity has collapsed geological time into a human life span. The first half of this book explores the origins of carbon and life, and cases in which evolutionary innovations redirected how carbon cycle through the atmosphere, oceans, and land. The second half covers just the last 150 years, and explains how scientists, industrialists and consumers created what amounts to an industrial carbon cycle – the flushing of million of years of geological sediment back into the atmosphere. ….

~ Excerpts from Prologue