The Carbon Cycle PDF

The Carbon Cycle In ecosystems, it’s commonly known that biotic elements such as plants and animals rely on one another for food, shelter, and reproduction. Abiotic elements like sunlight, oxygen, and water are also major components of an ecosystem, but are they necessary for survival? You may be su...

The Carbon Cycle In ecosystems, it’s commonly known that biotic elements such as plants and animals rely on one another for food, shelter, and reproduction. Abiotic elements like sunlight, oxygen, and water are also major components of an ecosystem, but are they necessary for survival? You may be surprised to learn how much you rely on the nonliving parts of your environment. In this article, we’ll focus on the element carbon and how it cycles through the biosphere to support life. What is Carbon? Carbon is the 6th element on the periodic table. In its simplest form, it is an atom with 6 protons, 6 neutrons, and 6 electrons. One critically important key to carbon’s importance to life is found in its outer electron shell. There, it has 4 electrons. To become stable, carbon needs to fill its shell with 4 more electrons. So what? That means that carbon can bond with 4 other atoms simultaneously. To compare, the average Lego piece can only connect with 2 other Legos at the same time. Imagine what you could build with a set of Legos that could connect in 4 directions! That’s exactly what carbon does for life. After removing the water from a living thing, the next most common element you’ll find is carbon. Trees, humans, fish, and all other life on Earth is built of carbon. We are carbon! Carbon in the Air Carbon is also floating around in the air around us in two main forms: methane and carbon dioxide. Both of these gasses are good insulators, which means they trap heat and contribute to the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect is the accumulation of heat in Earth’s atmosphere as the sun’s warmth is not able to escape as quickly as it collects. Carbon dioxide is the waste product of cellular respiration, the process all living things use to release energy from food. In other words, as all life releases the energy they need to live, carbon dioxide is created as a waste. With all life exhaling carbon dioxide, our Earth would heat up very quickly. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen. Plants are the hero of this story. Plants conveniently need carbon dioxide to pair with water and sunlight in photosynthesis as they make sugar. The combination of all the plants on Earth doing photosynthesis keeps the carbon dioxide under control and our Earth stays cool as a result. Carbon in the Earth When living things die, their bodies decompose and the carbon that made them is returned to the soil. If lots and lots of living things die in the same area, massive collections of carbon could form. The crude oil, coal, and gas that is mined to create fuel is just that: the carbon left over from organisms that died millions of years ago. Their bodies decomposed until only carbon remained. It just so happens that carbon is highly flammable and makes a wonderful fuel. You don’t have to wait a million years to prove it either. Even a tree that has been dead for a couple days will burn. It’s not the water in the tree that’s burning, so what is it? It’s the carbon! Crude oil, coal, and gas are simply very highly concentrated versions of that log. When we burn them, it’s as if a thousand logs were compressed into a tiny cup of black sludge. This liquid is extremely useful for keeping our fast-paced society on the go, powering cars, planes, and electrical plants, but there is a catch. In the water cycle, when water evaporates, does it disappear? No, it simply changes form. The carbon cycle is the same. When we burn (or combust) oil, coal, and gas that has been trapped underground for millions of years, where does the carbon go? It’s released in the air as carbon dioxide. These industrial emissions contribute to the warming of our planet through the greenhouse effect. Carbon in the Ocean Just as oxygen can be dissolved in water, so can carbon through a process called diffusion. The carbon in the ocean is also incorporated into the bodies of living things, especially in shells. It is also used by algae and other autotrophs to do photosynthesis. As a matter of fact, after the rainforests, the oceans are the world’s second-largest “carbon sink,” or place where carbon dioxide is removed from the air to prevent excessive global warming.