Energy & Green Tech

Burning calories for energy in the calorimetry lab

What is a calorie? While most people think of calories in relation to food, calories are simply a unit of heat energy. In fact, measuring calories is essential to energy science because every chemical reaction involves energy. ...

Energy & Green Tech

Plastic upcycling to close the carbon cycle

There's a lot of potentially useful raw materials bound up in used face masks, grocery bags and food wrap. But it has been much cheaper to keep making more of these single-use plastics than to recover and recycle them.

Energy & Green Tech

All-in-one solar-powered tower makes carbon-neutral jet fuel

Researchers have designed a fuel production system that uses water, carbon dioxide (CO2), and sunlight to produce aviation fuel. They have implemented the system in the field, and the design, publishing July 20 in the journal ...

Energy & Green Tech

Can sodium-ion batteries replace trusty lithium-ion ones?

Sodium-ion batteries are a potential replacement for lithium batteries, but the anodes—positively charged electrodes—that work well for lithium-ion batteries don't provide the same level of performance for sodium-ion ...

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Carbon cycle

The carbon cycle is the biogeochemical cycle by which carbon is exchanged among the biosphere, pedosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere of the Earth.

The carbon cycle is usually thought of as four major reservoirs of carbon interconnected by pathways of exchange. These reservoirs are:

The annual movements of carbon, the carbon exchanges between reservoirs, occur because of various chemical, physical, geological, and biological processes. The ocean contains the largest active pool of carbon near the surface of the Earth, but the deep ocean part of this pool does not rapidly exchange with the atmosphere.

The global carbon budget is the balance of the exchanges (incomes and losses) of carbon between the carbon reservoirs or between one specific loop (e.g., atmosphere ↔ biosphere) of the carbon cycle. An examination of the carbon budget of a pool or reservoir can provide information about whether the pool or reservoir is functioning as a source or sink for carbon dioxide.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA