What is Carbon Flux?

 

What is Carbon Flux?

What is Carbon Flux?

A carbon flux is that the amount of carbon exchanged between Earth's carbon pools, the oceans, atmosphere, land, and living things and are usually measured in units of gigatonnes of carbon per annum (GtC/yr). A gigatonne may be a tremendous amount of mass, roughly twice the mass of all humans on Earth combined, or the mass of about 200 million elephants. These carbon pools contain enormous quantities of carbon and exchange this matter in various ways.

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The Earth's carbon is exchanged globally in what's referred to as the carbon cycle. This cycle exchanges immense quantities of carbon annually, with values shown in Figure below. (Remember, each value during this figure represents 1 gigatonne, the mass of 200 million elephants.) The carbon cycle balances almost perfectly naturally, however when humans introduce carbon that was originally buried underground, this introduces an imbalance, as shown in red text in Figure.

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The carbon cycle of the world. Numbers represent the mass of carbon in gigatonnes (not the molecules, just carbon alone) that's cycled during a year. Yellow text is that the natural carbon cycle, with red text showing human effects. Notice that the 9 gigatonnes of carbon that humans are emitting (~35 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide) becomes an additional 4 gigatonnes within the atmosphere, an additional 3 gigatonnes of photosynthesis, and an additional 2 gigatonnes within the ocean per annum. this is often how humans are changing the natural carbon cycle.