Stan and Cartman broke the beaver dam and nearly destroyed the planet with global warming – and now it is happening for real in Fort Collins.
Ellen Wohl, a geology professor at Colorado State University, has published a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, describing the role beavers play in climate change. In a field study she undertook, she found that carbon is sequestered when beavers build dams and is released after the beavers abandon the dams they’ve built.
Most people are aware that beavers build dams. They’re responsible for river and stream blockage across many parts of North America. What has not been known, until now, is what sort of impact beaver dams and their backed up water have on carbon sequestering.
h/t to Dave G
She collected 29 sediment samples from the wet areas around 27 streams in the park. Upon analysis, the sediment turned out to be harboring 12 percent carbon by weight.
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it’s bacteria you moron….it’s called nitrification, ammonification, denitrification
look up marine sediments and how they work…and stop thinking it’s trees
Trust me, in Canada, we know our beavers and love them greatly.
Naughty Boy! 😉
Be careful while doing that… I hear they have a nasty bite… 🙂
As a geologist I can only shake my head and say WTF … can’t this silly cow do any real geology?
Beavers build dams that turn into meadows and they move on and build more dams or die.
I hear that beaver tail is a delicacy.
Save a tree, Eat a Beaver!
And little do they know that, while some beavers are building dams and sequestering carbon, others are abandoning (or dying) their dams. It’s a wash, you idiots!
No gas at any concentrations in the atmosphere can detectably warm the climate. CO2 is PLANT FOOD and we need all we can get as the climate cools for 30 to 120 years or into the next glaciation directly. Warming is our friend, cooling and freezing kills.
The public spent money on this “research”. A journal was stupid enough to publish it.
When the Hudson’s Bay Company was formed [May 2, 1670] they built numerous trading posts in Canada and bought beaver pelts from the aboriginals. They took so many pelts back to europe that the beaver population plummeted, thus releasing copious quantities of “carbon”, and therby causing the little ice age :^) OK?
BTW the HBC is still in business.
She has obviously overlooked the affect the fur trade had on beavers. In Canada, from ~1770 to ~1830 hundreds of millions of beavers were trapped and turned into hats, and nearly extirpated the critter from Quebec to Alberta to the edge of the Arctic Ocean.
OH wait……… maybe that should be the MWP… or?… anyway it caused something. ;^)