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Time has always been a fascinating concept to me. I still remember hearing about the concept of time travel and “changing” the past of the butterfly effect and thinking for hours about its implications or ways people could use this in their favor.
But it wasn’t just time travel. In school, biology and history were my favorite subjects. Seeing what happened in the past and how that shaped our present realities, I thought, was one of the most fascinating questions in life. It is no wonder that I ended up becoming a paleontologist.
We know that there’s a limited amount of carbon on earth and that we would rather have it sink to the bottom of the ocean or deep in rock layers than as carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. We talk about ways to naturally sequester this carbon back through plant photosynthesis and other geological processes.
However, I never thought that I had a bling spot about where this carbon was going, or other ways we are requesting it and preventing it from being released to the atmosphere. Or, in other ways, how not all carbon being extracted from sinks is being released into the atmosphere, driving climate change.
I’m talking about the carbon from human-made products.
While most have heard of “the carbon cycle” multiple times, when you work in paleontology and climate change science, this is something that you always have in the back of your mind when you present your findings at a conference, when you teach students or read a new research paper. |
