NASTY storms don鈥檛 just send sailors to Davy Jones鈥檚 locker 鈥� they dispatch huge volumes of carbon to the sea floor too.
Storms rip up vegetation and carbon-rich sediments, flushing them out to sea. The debris-filled flood water is denser than regular river water and sinks to the ocean floor, where it is eventually buried.
To find out just how much carbon is flushed away like this, Robert Hilton at the University of Cambridge and colleagues analysed samples taken from the Li Wu river in Taiwan during two major typhoons in 2004. They found that about 5000 tonnes of carbon was carried downriver by each typhoon-induced flood (Nature Geoscience, ).
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If global warming leads to more frequent typhoons, the amount of carbon sent to the seabed could increase 鈥� though not enough to offset emissions arising from human activity, Hilton says.
