‘Tree farts’ contribute about a fifth of greenhouse gases from ghost forests

Anons I’m not kidding this came from Science News, memes are seriously needed for this

The findings are helping researchers get a detailed accounting of the planet’s carbon budget

Maria Temming

May 20, 2021 at 6:00 am

tree trunks in shallow water

Ghost forests (one pictured in North Carolina) are coastal woodlands drowned by sea level rise. These arboreal cemeteries emit greenhouse gases from their soils and dead trees.

M. Ardón

If a tree farts in the forest, does it make a sound? No, but it does add a smidge of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.

Gases released by dead trees — dubbed “tree farts” — account for roughly one-fifth of the greenhouse gases emitted by skeletal, marshy forests along the coast of North Carolina, researchers report online May 10 in Biogeochemistry. While these emissions pale in comparison with other sources, an accurate accounting is necessary to get a full picture of where climate-warming gases come from.

A team of ecologists went sniffing for tree farts in ghost forests, which form when saltwater from rising sea levels poisons a woodland, leaving behind a marsh full of standing dead trees. These phantom ecosystems are expected to expand with climate change, but it’s unclear exactly how they contribute to the world’s carbon budget.

“The emergence of ghost forests is one of the biggest changes happening in response to sea level rise,” says Keryn Gedan, a coastal ecologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the work. “As forests convert to wetlands, we expect over long timescales that’s going to represent a substantial carbon sink,” she says, since wetlands store more carbon than forests. But in the short term, dead trees decay and stop taking up carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, “so that’s going to be a major greenhouse gas source.”

To better understand how ghost forests pass gas into the atmosphere, the researchers measured greenhouse gases wafting off dead trees and soil in five ghost forests on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula in North Carolina. “It’s kind of eerie” out there, says Melinda Martinez, a wetland ecologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

But Martinez ain’t afraid of no ghost forest. In 2018 and 2019, she measured CO2, methane and nitrous oxide emissions from dead trees using a portable gas analyzer she toted on her back. “I definitely looked like a ghostbuster,” she says.

Wetland ecologist Melinda Martinez totes a portable gas analyzer on her back to measure the “tree farts” emitted by a ghost forest tree. A tube connects the gas analyzer to an airtight seal around the trunk of the tree.M. Ardón

Soils gave off most of the greenhouse gases from the ghost forests. Each square meter of ground emitted an average 416 milligrams of CO2, 5.9 milligrams of methane and 0.1 milligrams of nitrous oxide per hour. On average, dead trees released about 116 milligrams of CO2, 0.3 milligrams of methane and 0.04 milligrams of nitrous oxide per square meter per hour — totaling about one-fourth the soil’s emissions.

Measuring greenhouse gases from the trees is “kind of measuring the last breath of these forests,” says Marcelo Ardón, an ecosystems ecologist and biogeochemist at North Carolina State University. The dead trees “don’t emit a ton, but they are important” to a ghost forest’s overall emissions.

Ardón coined the term “tree farts” to describe the dead trees’ greenhouse gas emissions. “I have an 8-year-old and an 11-year-old, and fart jokes are what we talk about,” he explains. But the analogy has a biological basis, too. Actual farts are caused by microbes in the body; the greenhouse gases emitted by ghost forests are created by microbes in the soil and trees.

In the grand scheme of carbon emissions, ghost forests’ role may be minor. Tree farts, for instance, have nothing on cow burps (SN: 11/18/15). A single dairy cow can emit up to 27 grams of methane — a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 — per hour. But accounting for even minor sources of carbon is important for fine-tuning our understanding of the global carbon budget, says Martinez (SN: 10/1/19). So it would behoove scientists not to turn up their noses at ghost tree farts.

anons we can make money measuring tree farts, are you in?

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ghost-forest-tree-farts-emissions-greenhouse-gases

In a first, neutrinos were caught interacting at the Large Hadron Collider

A proof-of-concept experiment paves the way for a larger detector in 2022

Need a science fag to interpret please

Emily Conover

May 26, 2021 at 11:30 am

diagram of the FASER experiment

The FASER experiment (illustrated) will search for hard-to-spot particles at the Large Hadron Collider. That includes neutrinos, for which scientists will use the FASERν detector (yellow, in the trench at right). A pilot version of the detector just reported its first results.

FASER/CERN

The Large Hadron Collider’s claim to fame is its ability to unveil elusive subatomic particles. But there’s one class of particle that it had never directly detected, even though it produces them in abundance. Neutrinos, minute elementary particles, interact so little with matter that they sail through the particle accelerator’s massive detectors unnoticed (SN: 4/8/21).

Now, in a proof-of-concept experiment, the first evidence for neutrino interactions at the LHC has been spotted, researchers with the FASER collaboration report May 13 at arXiv.org. The technique could open up a window to neutrinos at energies for which the particles’ interactions are poorly understood.

It’s the first glimpse of neutrinos produced in a particle collider, a type of particle accelerator that smashes beams of particles together. Physicists have detected neutrinos from particle accelerators by smashing a beam of particles into a stationary target, but not in collisions. Looking for neutrinos in particle collisions allows scientists to probe higher energies, but it also makes the neutrinos more difficult to study.

To catch the neutrinos interacting, the researchers used a detector containing films similar to those used in photographic film. When a charged particle passes through a film, it leaves behind a track marking where it’s been. Neutrinos, which have no electric charge, don’t leave tracks in the detector. But when a neutrino interacts with matter inside the detector, it produces a spurt of charged particles that point to a neutrino as their source.

The researchers put their detector in a region that neutrinos pass through as they shoot forward from particle collisions in the LHC’s ATLAS detector. After estimating how many of the detections might be due to other particles that can mimic neutrinos, the researchers report that they caught about six neutrino interactions.

The LHC, located near Geneva, has been shut down for upgrades since 2018. The experiment, performed shortly before the shutdown, served as a test run for a future experiment, called FASERν, which will start up when the LHC restarts in 2022. FASERν is expected to detect around 10,000 neutrinos during the next period of LHC operations, from 2022 to 2024.

With FASERν, researchers will measure neutrinos’ cross sections, a measure of how likely the particles are to interact with material. That’s important for being able to perform other measurements on neutrinos. For example, scientists can learn about the production of energetic neutrinos in exploding stars and other cosmic sources by detecting them on Earth. But to determine how prevalent such neutrinos are, scientist need to know how likely those neutrinos are to interact with detectors.

Cross sections depend on particles’ energies, and at the LHC, “we can study the energy range we haven’t studied,” says particle physicist Tomoko Ariga of Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, a member of the FASER collaboration.

It’s not a surprise to find neutrinos at the LHC. “This isn’t the Earth-shattering result,” says particle physicist Deborah Harris of York University in Toronto and Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., who was not involved with the research. Instead, it shows that detecting neutrinos at the LHC is possible.“This idea is not totally crazy,” she says..

CERN said it’s totally not crazy, does anyone have to say this or believe this? After all it is CERN

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/neutrinos-detection-large-hadron-collider

>>13770798

Take to a conservative doctor fast and quick, God will save him I hope

>>13770686

Seriously what happened to him, he looks so deformed and weird now. Too bad he a good actor

>>13770666

God bless that man!