- Pine trees, bumblebees, and Swiss cheese?
What do these all have in common?
It's carbon!
Carbon can be found almost everywhere.
Find out just how important carbon is to life on Earth
next on "Real World."
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Carbon is not only the fourth most-abundant element
in the universe, it's also one of the essential
building blocks of life.
It's in our bodies and in our food,
but what is carbon, anyway?
- Carbon is one of the basic building blocks
of life on Earth.
It's found all over the place,
like in animals, plants,
and it's also found in nonliving material
like rocks and the atmosphere.
- Carbon is important for many reasons,
including providing lots of the power that we use.
It's found in coal.
It's found in fossil fuels.
It's found, really, in all of our main sources of energy.
We can find carbon in many different types of source pools.
There's a lot of carbon in the ocean.
That's actually one of our main carbon pools on our planet.
You can find carbon in the atmosphere
as different gases,
such as carbon dioxide,
and you find lots of carbon in the terrestrial areas.
So in plants, in trees, or in soils.
- So what else do we know about this carbon cycle?
- So the carbon cycle is the cycle of where carbon goes,
and also how carbon moves from one pool into a different one.
- Carbon cycle is a system,
this Earth process,
that transfers carbon
from the plant material
to the atmosphere
back to the plant material;
from the oceans to the atmosphere, back to the oceans;
and from far below ground,
from fossilized carbon pools to the atmosphere.
- So fast-moving carbon, for example,
is what gets stored in plants.
You have photosynthesis that happens,
which is essentially, really, a mechanism
by which plants are able to absorb carbon
from the atmosphere
and they essentially use the carbon to make sugar,
which is the basis
of all carbohydrates.
And that carbon that's fixed there in these plants
is fast carbon.
- Slower carbon will refer to, over time,
sort of the integration of, perhaps, atmospheric carbon
into the ocean and down into the depths of the ocean.
One manner in which it's transferred
from the atmosphere to the oceans might be
through photosynthesis that's done by plankton in the ocean,
and then the consumption of that plankton
by higher level species.
And then the eventual decay of some of that organic material,
those species will, to some extent,
decay and be transferred to the bottom of the ocean
where the carbon that used to be part of those species
gets locked away in ocean sediments.
- Humans have a huge impact on the carbon cycle
because, essentially, we are changing how it is.
We are taking a lot of these pools of slow carbon
and burning it
and putting it into the atmosphere.
So we're really changing where the carbon is
and that has some big implications.
So we're not really changing how much carbon is there.
The amount of carbon is always the same,
but what we're changing is where it is
and what form it's in.
So if you put the carbon-- take the slow carbon,
you burn it, then you put it into the atmosphere,
it gets expanded, and the atmosphere
is a much smaller pool
than the ocean is, for example,
or our terrestrial reservoirs are.
- Humans have a really important role in the carbon cycle.
But how does NASA measure carbon as it moves?
- We have different ways of measuring carbon.
For example, we work on measuring the carbon
that's stored in trees.
And to do that, we use different types of instruments.
We do field work, and we also use satellite data.
For example, data from some new satellites
like ICESat-2 and GEDI.
- One way we do those measurements
is with satellite imagery
or satellite estimates.
We use LIDAR instruments
that are in space
that are pointed down at the Earth
that shoot LIDAR pulses towards the Earth
and measure the time that it takes
for those pulses to return
to the satellite sensor.
From those pieces of information,
we can learn about the height of forests
and other structural characteristics
of the forest canopy.
- In addition to using the satellite data,
we also have to do field work.
We go in the field and we measure what species it is.
We get the biometry of the tree, which is--
a biometry is measuring of the living things.
We take a tape and we put it around the tree
and we measure the circumference,
measure the height of a tree,
and then we compare that to what we're getting
from the satellite.
- We would like to get a better understanding
of where carbon exists on the landscape.
- Carbon really is essential to all life as we know it,
and we can see the carbon cycle in motion
thanks to NASA's eyes in the sky,
on the ground, and in space.
"C" ya next time on "Real World."