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The Fast Carbon Cycle · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Hey there, Professor Rymanck.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: How you doing?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Bull Hoys.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: What's going on?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: What do you have going on up in your upper lip there?
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Are you trying to grow a mustache?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is uh this is not having shaved in a little while.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it just looks real grimy.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: I still, you know what?
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: I I've got uh a really good neck beard and a lot of peach fuzz in this sort of goatee area.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I look like an unkept 15-year-old.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: If I Yeah, you look like Teen Wolf.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Teen Wolf.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good one.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly what I look like.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: So this is just me not having uh trimmed in a while.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm looking unprofessional and unkept for you, man.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I know, but you do have that professor sweater on.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's it makes you look smart, it enhances your um your intelligence.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's a good one, yeah.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Except I just offset it by not not shaving.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So you can grow a neard, though, like none other.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's really impressive, to be honest with you.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: It it comes in quite nicely.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I bet you though, Tess does not like and appreciate the neared.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: No, oh no, no, no, no, no, no.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: It it doesn't last very long without getting a lot of comments about.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: So then you, however, sir, are are have it's getting almost to the level of being able to braid it.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's getting close.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's getting close.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: I look forward to it.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: We've attempted it, actually.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: We've we've attempted it, yeah.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Have you decided what color beads you're gonna put into it?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I don't know what color beads, but beads it will be.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Can I make a suggestion?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, absolutely.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, here's what I think.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think you should go for like a southwest theme, and you should have black and silver, and can you get some little malachite ones or something like that?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Or um I don't know.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know what though?
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the thing.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: I can't go silver because they'll blend right into my That's true.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Fair point, fair point.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: I I didn't think of that.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good point.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'll look forward to the color palette that you choose.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: All right, all right.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'll it'll be a surprise.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: It'll be a surprise.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Today, Chris, we are picking up with this sort of climate theme.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: And this one's gonna be on the fast carbon cycle.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: So previously we've talked about the slow carbon cycle, and this is a part of the book that we have where we've taken a bunch of these podcasts related to Earth's climate.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: We've added some images to them, and they're available on our Camp Geo app for a couple bucks right now.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, you're listening to this podcast.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: If you're on your podcast platform, you're not gonna get any of the images or really any of the discussion about the images because we can't give them to you in the way that we want.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: If you go to our Camp Geo app, you get all of these episodes about Earth's climate, a couple hours of content with all the images for a couple bucks.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: So head over there, first link in the show notes if you want that.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of the lead-in here.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like you said, we're gonna hit today the fast carbon cycle.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we talk about this in terms of the carbon cycle that occurs on human timescales.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: So we're talking now decades, hundreds of years, not thousands or millennia.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, can I just interrupt real quick, Chris, and say that the reason we're talking about this, if you're in the podcast platform, is because we, well, we talked about the slow carbon cycle, we talked about the greenhouse effect.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we talked about the greenhouse effect a long time ago, and also more recently.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: But the reason that we focus on carbon cycles is because carbon cycles through the Earth's system at different rates.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: And the important thing is that it takes a long time for these cycles to kind of turn on and off.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to talk about the fast mode right now, which is the less important one for global warming, but still important.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it is exceedingly important.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: So the slow carbon cycle deals primarily with geology and geologic processes.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: The fast carbon cycle is this interesting intersection between biology and geology, actually, right?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Would you agree with that statement?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: I agree, and I agree.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: But I think, you know, we can ask the listener to say which one's better.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the default answer should be the slow one because it's based on rocks and things like that.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: But uh, but yes, you're right.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: The fast carbon cycle has a lot to do with biology, really.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: There's it has a little bit of geology for sure, but a lot to do with biology.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the fast carbon cycle, is one that I think changes more throughout Earth history.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like over long time scales, 10 million years ago, the fast carbon cycle would have been a lot different because biology would have been a lot different.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, 150 million years ago, this would have been a very different looking cycle that we're talking about.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: But we're talking about things that are like yearly to lifetime levels of sort of cyclicity to it.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because we can't talk about the fast carbon cycle without talking about photosynthesis, and we're gonna start with that.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're not gonna get into all that we could.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: We're just a couple geologists, not we're not biologists.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And photosynthesis is a complicated thing.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you recall back to your high school biology days, Jesse, with your dad.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: You actually sat in your dad's room and learned all you can learn about photosynthesis.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: All about it.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: We can simplify this and bring it down to a level that it's good enough for explaining how it ties into this fast carbon cycle.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Before we get too deep into this episode and get lost on ourselves, let's give a brief rundown in terms of what we want to accomplish in this episode on the fast carbon cycle.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so today we're we're really gonna talk about photosynthesis, which you you briefly mentioned, things that take carbon out of the atmosphere, things that put it back in.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: And again, we're focusing on this fast carbon cycle, this sort of lifelike carbon cycle.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna talk about how it cycles, the time frames it cycles, year to year, etc.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: We're also gonna talk a little bit about Milankovich cycles, because there are some sort of earth processes that govern how fast biology works and in which way it works.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: That'll lead us into links between the fast and slow carbon cycles and how humans are kind of getting in the middle of those two cycles and then sort of end with that discussion about rapid changes to these both of these carbon cycles, or really the entire carbon cycle on Earth.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: So, Chris, lead us off here with talking about what numbers are we talking about here with the fast carbon cycle?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, first of all, I I think what I want to emphasize is there are huge ranges in these numbers.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like this, these are staggering ranges in terms of the carbon that cycles through this carbon cycle, both the fast and the slow.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's important to at least bring up right off the bat.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: But basically, we're talking about one to a hundred billion metric tons every year of carbon that cycles through on a year-to-year basis.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's a lot of carbon that we're talking about.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, a ton of carbon.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Up to a hundred billion metric tons of carbon cycling every year.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And why does carbon play at center stage here?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: It really has to do with this kind of unique ability of carbon to bond really readily and quite strong, actually, with four other atoms.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you had to do this, I think, right?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't we didn't talk about this, but did you take organic chemistry in college?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: No, I did not.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: I avoided organic chemistry.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes, for sure.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: I actually had to take it, and you know, it's that's all you deal with in organic chemistry, is you deal with carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you look at that and you're like, well, that's gotta be pretty simple.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: No, I thought organic chemistry was a beast.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's definitely, it used to be at least the kind of filter class for pre-med people where it's like a weeder class.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: A weeder class for people who wanted to go into medicine.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's super complicated.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Carbon can form really, really durable bonds.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Think about diamond, it's all carbon.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Really, really tightly bound carbon, really tight bonds.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the tightness of the bonds means that when you break that, it releases a lot of energy.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: It requires a lot of energy to make the bond, but when you break it, it releases a lot of energy.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: So that's you know one of the keys here.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and examples of the way carbon bonds with other atoms, you know, you got DNA, but you also have the fossil fuels, which is what you and I like to focus on, you know, things like gasoline and methane and propane and and even coal, which is not really hydrocarbon, but it's similar.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Wax.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Just regular old wax, you know?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: C25H52, baby.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's all but the thing is, is that why is this so important?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you alluded to it.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: These bonds, they're strong.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: What that means then is when you break these bonds by burning it, you release the energy that's held there inside of those bonds, right?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: You're just releasing it, and it's a lot, and that's that's what makes this whole discussion important.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one of the the key things and the things to remember here is that hydrocarbons are really important to society.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's not much out there that has the energy density of oil, and we need energy as a society, right?
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like, and we've built these societies that were consume a lot of energy, and that is one thing that has a huge amount of energy density.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of things we have in society are because of hydrocarbons in many ways, let alone like the plastics and all that other kind of industry.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: There's a problem, you know, there are definite catastrophic potential downsides to using this stuff, but it has been valuable, and I think it's important to not kind of forget that.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: But Chris, what we're talking about here with the fast carbon cycle is it's life.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: The fast carbon cycle is intimately, it basically is life.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's sort of the cycles of life on Earth.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, Jesse, basically you're referring to photosynthesis, and so I think we've avoided it long enough.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get into the basic chemical equation of photosynthesis, right?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, so we're gonna simplify this down.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: We're not gonna balance chemical equations and all that, but basically, we're talking about carbon dioxide, CO2, plus water, H2O, plus energy from the sun will yield through plant growth.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: So what's happening is these plants will take these compounds and rearrange it to grow, and they'll produce then sugar, basically CH2O or C6H12O6, but let's simplify it, plus O2, just oxygen, breathable oxygen is put back in.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: So when plants grow, they're taking carbon out of the atmosphere and returning sugar back to the ground through this growth plus oxygen.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it's actually like this is shocking, Jesse, that something like the Amazon rainforest, 20% of the air we breathe comes straight out of the rainforest.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Of the oxygen, right?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: You're referring to like the oxygen that we consume.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a massively important process.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: And plants, land plants are the key one, well, one of the big ones to do this.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's a really important framework.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Think of the word hydrocarbons, right?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about hydrocarbons, you know, things that have hydrogen and oxygen carbon in them, right?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the molecules that we're working with, and those are the elements we're working with to make these important molecules.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the important thing here, you're we're making these really very energetic bonds.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: We're making carbon and oxygen and carbons bonded together.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're we're making sugars out of this the carbon and the water and the energy from the sun.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, the other important thing here is that these things respire.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: So that carbon that's stored up in the sugars, some of it goes out in plant respiration, some of it's stored in the soil, some of it's stored in the tree, in the leaves, etc.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: Then what happens?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the leaves fall off the tree, the branches fall down, the tree dies, those sugars then go into the soil, and like microbes and all sorts of other stuff decomposes it.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: That decomposition then breaks those energetic bonds, uses that energy for life, and then sends the carbon, the CO2, back into the atmosphere.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then that completes the cycle.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of looping back and forth over and over and over again.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's right, Jesse.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the only other thing that I would add to that then, in another way that carbon gets put back into the atmosphere, is anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe Chris, let's let's nail that point again.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: Let's put a pin in that and come back to it at the end because we can kind of then link that gives us a way to link the fast carbon cycle to the slow carbon cycle and show how humans are kind of getting in between these two things by taking stuff out of the slow and putting it into the fast, basically.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, wildfires do this too.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, recently there's some huge amounts of wildfires up in the Arctic of Canada, you know, where I do field work, and those put a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere just by burning those.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: The reason it burns is because those bonds are really energetic.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of energy stored in those bonds, and so burning wood, you know, produces fire.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: So that's another uh point there.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: To me, another interesting thing about that with fires and burning wood, you know, wildfires and so on, I burn a lot of wood at my house, and that's putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but it's considered to be carbon neutral, which I found to be interesting because you're burning wood that not too long ago took carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and I'm just putting it back in.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's not really a part of the long carbon cycle.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: You get the Segway Award, perhaps, here, because this gives us a good opportunity to talk about the measurement of this carbon cycle.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And we can see this.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at a CO2 chart of carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, CO2 in the atmosphere, and you look at that chart, over time, we've talked about the hockey stick graph that like over time it's going up and up and up, 420 parts per million now on average.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: But the key thing there is on average, on a monthly basis, this thing goes up and down.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: So in the spring it goes up by a couple parts per million, the winter goes down by a couple parts per million.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the key here, Chris, is to think about where is there the most landmass?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: And what do we need to get seasonality?
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: We need kind of moderate climate that has all four seasons, right?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: You need to have spring where leaves are growing, summer where leaves are in full bloom, fall where leaves are dropping, and then winter where things are decomposing.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that kind of process doesn't happen a lot in the Arctic, it doesn't happen a lot in the Antarctic, it doesn't happen a lot at the equator either.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, leaves aren't dropping off dramatically in equatorial latitudes.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: So we need this kind of mid-latitudes, and if you just look at where the continents are today on Earth, most continents are either equator or in the sort of mid-northern latitudes.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: So this is why this cycle goes in the direction it goes, meaning in the fall, leaves are falling off and the CO2 is going up because those leaves are decomposing over the winter progressively, keeps driving up and up and up.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Then May hits and we start to get new buds on the trees.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: The trees are growing new leaves, that's taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, sequestering it in the leaves.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then over the summer, that continues and they're drawing down CO2 continually during the growing season.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then again, we repeat the cycle over and over.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a really beautiful example of life, this fast carbon cycle, life controlling it.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, carbon dioxide levels cycle up and down every single year because of photosynthesis.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: But the overall trend is every year goes up and then up and then up.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: So you have two trends that are happening.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: You have this up and down trend every year, and then you have this gradual increase trend that happens every year too, which is undeniable.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it this is it is undeniable.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we burning fossil fuels right now, it makes the world go round and it's staying in the atmosphere for 100 to 200 years.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: So as long as we continue to do this, we're gonna see that trend increase on a year-to-year to year basis.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's exactly right, Chris.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: So have we hit the the sort of life-mediated like yearly carbon cycle, the yearly fast carbon cycle?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: If we kind of covered that, should we move into Milankovic cycles in a little bit longer-term cyclicity here?
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because this often gets confused.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you hear this a lot in the discussion around climate, carbon dioxide, and climate change.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: These natural variations get intertwined in this discussion all the time.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: So let's, yeah, absolutely.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do it.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about the Milankovic cycles.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: So Milankovic cycles, just as a little kind of primer, are really oscillations in Earth's orbit or in Earth's orbit around the sun or the tilt of Earth's axis.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's a couple of them, and they get kind of complicated.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: They have their own sort of cycles, and then the cycles feed back on top of each other and kind of layer on top of each other.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: So you get these sort of positive feedback loops and negative feedback cycles.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: But basically they're they're cycles, they're transitions in Earth's orbit, variations in Earth's orbit, variations in the amount of sun that is hitting Earth and where it's hitting Earth.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's the key.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: So the amount of sunlight that's hitting Earth at a particular time of year and where it's hitting Earth, which really controls plant growth.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so Milankovic cycles over time have changed the amount of sunlight hitting the northern latitudes versus the equatorial latitudes and the intensity and the seasonality, the intensity of the seasons, which again control the amount of life that's happening.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so this fast carbon cycle process.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: It can get turbocharged or not turbocharged, is kind of the way I think about it.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: These orbital variations, these Melankovich cycles, they lead to predictable changes in climate on a scale of roughly 20,000-year cyclic time periods.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it's it's kind of an interesting thing, right?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: That the carbon dioxide levels change in response to the temperature changes that are taking place on a natural variable, right?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: So interesting things about this or important things about these Milankovic cycles is that the Milankovic cycles themselves can change the temperature of the earth.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: So the temperature is changing due to just the Milankovic cycles.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: But then CO2 and plant life, we've talked about CO2 being this positive feedback loop where it can kind of run away, right?
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about this with albedo, where it gets warmer and then the glaciers melt, and then there's more greenhouse effect, then it gets warmer, et cetera, et cetera.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: This can happen.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: So CO2 concentration doesn't, it doesn't really drive these Milankovic cycles.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: It enhances the warming and cooling related to the Milankovic cycles.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it creates these oscillations between about 180 and 280 parts per million CO2 that are kind of the natural Milankovic style cyclicity, pre-human cyclicity in CO2.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: At least, this is a big caveat, at least in the recent record.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: So given the current configuration of the continents and given the current like you know, ocean circulation patterns, this is the way it worked over the last 50,000 years or something.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: This 180 to 280 parts per million CO2.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: But it's safe to say though, you said it, it enhances the temperature, so it sets the temperature.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: It sets the thermostat for our atmosphere.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: So Jesse, then let's transition into kind of wrapping this episode up.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: We need to talk about the link, or the links, I should say, between the fast and the slow carbon cycle.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because they are intertwined with each other.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh I know.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's true.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: But you know what, Chris?
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just thinking back to like where my mind went was really pulling apart little shale.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you remember where were we?
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: Were the I I know I've I always forget this.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: Was it the Green River Formation?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: Floresant, Colorado.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yes.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and we're like, you know, peeling apart little pieces of slate and shale and looking for fossils.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: I found a little spider fossil.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think you found a mosquito.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: A mosquito, that's right.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: You found a cool mosquito one.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, and and you look at this and it's got this dark matter in there, right?
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like the fossil is kind of made of it's a darker part of the rock, right?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: And and that's the former organism that's fossilized now, the former like sugars that made up that organism that are fossilized.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: But it's part of the rock record now in this like really spectacularly beautiful, pristinely preserved way.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just a side note, Jesse.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: This summer, I took my students into the fossil forest in Yellowstone National Park.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: We were near this massive redwood, it was a horizontal log.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was huge, you know, and we're just kind of like just standing there in awe of this thing.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the one of my students just happened to pick up a rock and he turned it over, and there was a perfect imprint of a fern in this rock.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: No kidding.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was beautiful.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesse, I'm gonna say, like, this was one of the he said to me, this student, his name is Greg.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about what it is.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: I showed everybody what it was, we took pictures of it, and then we put it back, turned it upside down and put it right back where it was.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want the fern sticking out because then somebody's gonna come along, and it was just a cool thing.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was a it was such an opportunity to talk to the kids about that because I know they wanted to take it, and it was a really good opportunity to talk about no, we don't do that.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna leave this here.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is we're gonna take pictures of it, and then we're gonna put that sucker right back where it belongs.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a really good opportunity for that.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: But the other thing is, Greg said to me when we were on our way down, he said, Mr.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Bois, thanks for one of the best days of my entire life.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was just like such a cool thing to see this ancient plant locked up in a rock now.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's just unbelievable.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really, really beautiful, I mean, it's an amazing thing.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I tend to think, Chris, of you know, we go on the summer science trip.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: When I joined you, what was that, 2019?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think was the last time.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um I came out there and I think the first night I show up, I think I landed in the evening, and we right away kind of showed up at camp and we had a fire, like big group, you know, all the 25 students, and you and me and the other sort of leaders sitting around the fire, just just chatting, you know.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: And we're sitting around the fire and we're burning wood.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: And behind us are these great fossil forests and stuff, and that's a great juxtaposition to kind of show the point here because you just talked about very very rightly, you said when You burn wood in your wood-burning stove to heat your house, it's kind of carbon neutral because you're taking wood that was formed in this fast carbon cycle, and you're taking that and putting it back into the air, and you know that CO2 will go to grow another tree, right?
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: Presumably.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that's true.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's a it's this fast sort of renewable carbon cycle, if you will.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: But the difference is if we take oil or coal out of the ground, which is ancient plant life now stored up in rocks, and we burn that stuff, that's not just going to grow into trees.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's the difference.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: We're taking stuff out of the slow carbon cycle, the rock carbon cycle, and we're burning it and putting it into the atmosphere, which is this sort of reservoir that both the fast and the slow carbon cycles use.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the slow carbon cycle can't make rock quick enough to compensate for this.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think that to me, like that juxtaposition really is a beautiful example.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: The way you phrase that of burning your wood stove is kind of carbon neutral, whereas you know, heating your house with propane is is not really the same thing.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Burning a piece of wood in your fire stove, that that wood just grew.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: You're taking something out of rock, and that's the link, right?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about linking the fast carbon cycle and the slow carbon cycle.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: Life is the link because life is stored in rocks, right?
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's absolutely that's what we're talking about.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: But we're talking about taking rocks that are millions of years old.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it was taken out of the cycle.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then we put it back in by, well, by burning fossil fuels.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: You put it back in.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about bringing on humans, right?
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: You talk about clearing land, which diminishes photosynthesis.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: This is uh let me just clearing of the land is just a huge one.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I live here in Pennsylvania, in this sort of the the Pennsylvania Wilds district where it's all forested now, and it always was forested, and but humans came through and clear-cut basically the whole thing to supply, you know, all the wood for all the foundries originally.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then we discovered oil, clear-cut the land to, you know, build the derricks and pump oil and all that coal, steel, sort of industrial, sort of American stuff here in the Rust Belt was really fueled by the forests of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now you drive across, when I drive back to Michigan across the Pennsylvania, Ohio Turnpikes, I'm driving through fields a lot of the time.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Many of them, the vast majority, used to be huge forests.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, a lot of this land was clear-cut right down to now fields which don't have as much carbon stored in them, really.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: Chris, a little side tangent here.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: I just heard about this recently that some of the coal like in Pennsylvania, we have a lot of these coal seams as well, big coal mining district historically.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: We're actually figuring out that above and below these coal beds, actually, there's a pretty big enrichment in some of the critical minerals like lithium and rare earth elements, are kind of enriched in these coal seams or just above and below these coal seams.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so, actually, going back to some of the coal like slag piles or or sort of um the waste piles in the coal mining process, those might be like good places to extract a lot of these critical minerals we want for like a battery-electrified society.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: So just kind of an interesting juxtaposition there between this super dirty uh industry and then perhaps the metals we need for the future.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: There is a stupendous amount of coal stored in these seams.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's enough.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: If we continued to burn coal for electricity the way that we have historically, we have a hundreds of years of coal just in this one one area.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's an amazing amount.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: I just read in the news as well that there was some deposit of, again, similar to Pennsylvania here.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: There's critical minerals in there in these deposits of Wyoming, up to tens of billions of dollars worth in one coal mine that they're about to start to mine the rare earth elements out of this former coal mine now.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a really kind of interesting juxtaposition here to kind of bring it back here to the fast carbon cycle.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: This is the fast carbon cycle, this is just stuff being stored in the rock.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's moving out of the fast carbon cycle, this biomass, and being stored in the rock cycle, in the slow carbon cycle.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: And coal is forming coal is that process.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: Forming oil is that process, forming natural gas is that process.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then humans are kind of reversing that pretty fast.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so before let's let's go ahead and wrap this up, Jesse.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it's we're getting that time.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: So let's just kind of summarize a couple things that these rapid effects to the the fast carbon cycle can do.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we've talked about how carbon sets the temperature and fast changes can there's feedback loops in here, so it can create really fast transitions in the carbon cycle, like with Milankovic cycles.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: The temperature regulates the amount of water in the atmosphere, so like humidity, how much is locked up in oceans, how much is locked up in ice caps.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then we haven't really touched on this too much, but ocean acidification is a big deal as well.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: The more CO2 in the atmosphere, then the more CO2 goes into the ocean, especially the top level of the ocean, and that creates a more acidic environment, which can really sort of, as we're seeing, bleach some corals and then combine that.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, any intro-level geology class in the world, you learn that the reactivity that limestone has with acid.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so if the oceans become more acidic, a lower pH, then these organisms that take calcium carbonate out and use it to make their shells, they're dissolved by acid.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: So it's this delicate balance of if they become too acidic, then these organisms can't make their shells.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: It upsets the entire food chain and it upsets because most photosynthesis on our planet actually takes place in the oceans.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's exactly right.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so it perturbs this whole fast and slow carbon cycle that we've been kind of talking about.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: Ocean acidification is is often referred to as the ugly twin of climate change.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it's the combination, right?
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's both warming up the ocean and acidifying it a bit more.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: Those two things are really important.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, point being we don't want to be on a planet, we don't want to exist on a planet where we have these wild fluctuations going to like snowball events and then hothouse events.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's very unstable climate dynamics, and we don't want any part of that as society.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Even though our planet has experienced that in the past, we just don't want any any real part of that.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a wrap on this podcast episode.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: Again, you can find this episode along with several others in our Camp Geo app as part of a climate book with a bunch of images.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: And there we're selling it for a couple bucks.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: You can go there, get access to that, and you can see all the images.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: And really, I think Chris, these images help drive home the understanding of this really key principle and these really key processes of Earth's climate.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: You can go to our website, planetgeocast.com.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: There you can donate, subscribe, support us, follow all of our past episodes, learn about us.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: You can also send us an email, planetgeocast at gmail.com.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: We've been getting a lot of great listener questions, and so keep that up.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: Cheers.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: Peace.