CO2 measurements disrupted by volcanic eruption

For more than 60 years, atop Mauna Loa on Hawaii’s Big Island, a little more than two miles above sea level, a 124-foot-tall aluminum tower has been collecting carbon dioxide measurements nearly every hour of every day.

That stopped Sunday night when a lava flow from Mauna Loa erupted and cut power to monitoring laboratories there. Lava was still moving downhill from the volcano, overtaking roads Thursday, but posed little risk to nearby communities.

It was a rare break in data collection that produced the world’s longest continuous record of rising levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The record, named the Keeling Curve after the geochemist Charles David Keeling who started the monitoring program in 1958, reveals a jagged line that rises over time. Many scientists consider this pattern to be the most important evidence yet of climate change due to human activity.

“I think that record really influenced the whole career,” said Dr Keeling’s son Ralph.

Before the elder Dr Keeling’s work, many scientists believed that oceans and forests would absorb excess carbon dioxide emitted by burning fossil fuels.

Over time, the Keeling Curve disproves this idea. It’s starting to reveal how much carbon dioxide the land and ocean can absorb, said Maureen E. Raymo, director of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and co-founder of the Columbia Climate Institute.

The carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere accounts for about half of human emissions from burning fossil fuels; a quarter is absorbed by the oceans, and another quarter is absorbed by forests and stored in terrestrial ecosystems.

Measurements have been suspended only a few times over the past six decades: three months in 1964 due to federal budget cuts, and more than a month in 1984 when the volcano last erupted and cut power.

This time, it will take at least several months, if not longer, to get everything up and running again, said Dr. Ralph Keeling, who has since been in charge of monitoring his father’s death 2005.

Meanwhile, officials are considering a helicopter ride on a generator to the Mauna Loa Observatory, which is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA runs a second carbon dioxide monitoring program there, which was also interrupted by the outage.

There are hundreds of other monitoring stations around the world, more than 70 of which are operated by NOAA, so the global record will continue to be maintained. But none have quite the same symbolism as Mauna Loa, the birthplace of the first and most often cited figure.

In the late 1950s, Dr. Keeling the Elder developed the first technique to accurately measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

As part of a project at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, he made the first measurements on Mauna Loa, recording an average carbon dioxide concentration of 313 parts per million, meaning that for every million air particles, there are 313 A molecule of carbon dioxide.

Now, levels peak at around 421 parts per million, which is at least 4 million years. Last year, the total carbon dioxide emissions reached 36.3 billion tons, the highest level in history.

Without significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the planet is expected to warm by an average of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2100 compared to pre-industrial levels. A recent report by the United Nations.

That is well above the aspirational goals that governments agreed to in the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement, and exceeds what scientists say is the threshold for a significant increase in the risk of climate catastrophe.

While the Keeling curve shows a clear upward trend, it also shows an almost rhythmic pattern of zigzags and zigzags that mirrors the annual repeating seasonal cycle in the northern hemisphere. Many scientists like to say it shows the Earth is “breathing”.

Colm Sweeney, deputy director of NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory, said the planet “breathes out” carbon dioxide during the northern winter as vegetation decays and plants photosynthesize less. When spring comes, vegetation recovers, and plants and phytoplankton in the ocean begin to absorb more carbon dioxide.

The magnitude of the zigzag, or the difference between the highs and lows of the seasonal swings, has also grown larger. Dr Sweeney said this could indicate that the growing season in the northern hemisphere started earlier in the year as warmer temperatures melted snow and trees put out their leaves, essentially “spinning the wheels faster”.

The Keeling Curve is largely a victory for the two Dr. Keelings, as well as for painstaking precision A record needs to be created that can stand up to scrutiny. Dr Keeling said his father went over the measurements, fussing over every last number.Colleagues also Keeling the Elder As a “perseverant in every detail”.

He wanted to find the best location for monitoring, and chose Mauna Loa because of its remoteness, away from both sources of carbon dioxide, such as dense population centers or roads, and carbon sinks, such as areas of dense vegetation.

Even now, when scientists want to test new carbon dioxide monitoring devices, “they go to Mauna Loa,” Dr. Sweeney said.

Over time, the technique has evolved to be more precise. Over the past fifteen years, “we’ve improved our observations of subtleties in the record by almost an order of magnitude,” Dr. Sweeney said. These nuances constitute small but significant differences, as the researchers focused on changes in carbon dioxide levels as small as one in four thousandth.

The Keeling curve presents “a simple message, and that simple message has always been true,” said Dr. Ralph Keeling.

Still, he hopes that one day the curve will start to look different — bending, flattening and even starting to turn downward, indicating a reduction in, and eventual end to, the amount of carbon dioxide humans are rapidly pumping into the air.