RE: Number of carbon atoms in the Earth's biomass

From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Fri Jul 11 2003 - 12:16:54 MDT

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    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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