From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Fri Jul 11 2003 - 12:16:54 MDT
Amara Angelica writes:
> Does anyone have data on the total number of carbon atoms currently in
> the Earth's biomass and the rate of depletion?
I googled a good web page,
http://www.icsu-scope.org/downloadpubs/scope13/chapter06.html.
Some possibly surprising facts:
99% of the biomass is in plants, not animals or microorganisms.
99% of the plant biomass is in land plants, not ocean plants.
The total biomass is 829 x 10^15 grams of Carbon. If my calculations are
correct this is about 4 x 10^40 Carbon atoms. Of this the largest portion
is in tropical rain forests, about 40%.
Although the web page above has enormous detail about forestry operations,
it is a little hard to pull out a summary number. Section 6.3.1 gives
a 1977 estimate that the rate of deforestation is about 1.1 x 10^15 g/year,
with reforestation at about 0.3 x 10^15 g/year, for a net loss of
0.8 x 10^15 g/year.
It's not clear if this is the same "grams of Carbon" used elsewhere in
the report (versions "grams of wood") but assuming it is, that corresponds
to a loss of about 0.1% per year, or 4 x 10^37 Carbon atoms per year,
which would also be about 10^30 Carbon atoms lost to biomass per second.
All these numbers are very rough estimates.
Hal Finney
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