Land Ocean CArbon TransfEr (LOCATE)

我们的气候，以及我们的生活方式和经济，都深受大气中二氧化碳浓度的影响。大气中的二氧化碳浓度调节着从太阳到达地球并返回外太空的热量。在过去的250年里，土地开垦和燃烧化石燃料等人类活动使大气中的二氧化碳水平增加了约40%，其中大部分增加发生在第二次世界大战之后。这导致了可测量的气温上升，有记录以来最热的许多年都发生在过去十年。由于这个原因，我们的兴趣现在坚定地集中在碳循环的其他自然部分，特别是目前被锁在大气之外但可能随着气候变化进入大气的其他碳库。一个关键的碳库是土壤碳——全球土壤的碳含量大约是迄今为止通过燃烧进入大气的化石燃料碳的4倍，这个碳库在苏格兰北部等高纬度地区最大。英国的土壤碳库是我们“自然资本”的一个重要组成部分——生态系统对我们的价值。它是如此之大，以至于恢复它的一些受损元素，比如高地泥炭沼泽，可能会在未来40年里为我们节省5.7亿英镑的碳价值。随着英国和欧洲河流中的碳浓度逐渐增加，每年都会有一些碳渗入河流和小溪。当这些物质进入河口和沿海水域时，当细菌利用它们生长或被阳光破坏时，它们中的一些会回到大气中，一些被掩埋，一些进入开阔的海洋。我们不知道是什么控制着这些不同的过程，所以目前还不能说它们在未来会如何变化。由于这些原因，我们计划开展一个名为LOCATE的项目，该项目将确定泥炭地储量的现状（有多少土壤碳进入了我们的河流和河口），然后确定这些材料在河口发生了什么（包括测量关键过程）。在此基础上，我们将对英国大陆进行一些准确的最新碳计算，并生成一些简单的数学方程，描述我们河流和河口土壤有机质的变化。然后，这些方程将被嵌入到一个更大的地球系统模型中，这样我们就可以开始回答有关土壤有机碳库在未来50年或100年的长期命运的问题。

Our climate, and hence our lifestyle and economy, is profoundly influenced by the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, which regulates the amount of heat which arrives on earth from the sun that returns to outer space. Human activities such as land clearance and the burning of fossil fuels have increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by about 40% in the last 250 years, with most of this increase occurring since the Second World War. This has caused a measurable increase in our temperature, with many of the warmest years on record occurring in the last decade. For this reason our interest is now firmly focused on other natural parts of the carbon cycle, in particular other reservoirs of carbon which are currently locked away from the atmosphere but which might enter the atmosphere as climate changes. One key pool is soil carbon - soils across the globe contain about 4 times as much carbon as the fossil fuel carbon which to date has entered the atmosphere via combustion, with this pool being largest at high latitudes such as northern Scotland. The British pool of soil carbon is a large element of our 'natural capital' - the value that the ecosystem represents to us. It is so large that restoring some damaged elements of it, such as upland peat bogs, would probably save us 570 million pounds over the next 40 years in carbon values alone. Each year some of this leaches into rivers and streams, with the concentration of carbon in rivers gradually increasing in Britain and Europe. As this material gets into estuaries and coastal waters some of it gets returned to the atmosphere when bacteria use it to grow or when it's destroyed by sunlight, some is buried and some enters the open ocean. We don't understand what controls these various processes, so aren't currently in a position to say how they will change into the future. For these reasons we plan to undertake a programme called LOCATE, which will establish the current status of our peatland stocks is (how much soil carbon is getting into our rivers and estuaries), and then determine what happens to this material in our estuaries (including measuring the key processes). Based on this we will do some accurate up to date carbon accounts for the GB landmass and also produce some simple mathematical equations describing what happens to soil organic matter in our rivers and estuaries. These equations will then be embedded into a much larger model of the Earth System so that we can begin to answer questions about the long term fate of the soil organic carbon pool over the next 50 or 100 years.