The other aspect is that you want your framework to deteriorate slowly. “You want the lithium to move very fast, so you can charge your phone in a half hour or charge your car in an hour. His work aims to make the cars move faster and the roads smoother, more resilient, and environmentally friendly. The roads are elements like graphite, cobalt, nickel, and manganese oxide – they offer the infrastructure that allows lithium to travel.
The cars are lithium ions that speed around the roads when fueled with energy. To help people visualize his research, he asks them picture the innerworkings of a battery like cars driving through a city. His work is focused on building cheaper, more powerful and longer-lasting batteries that will allow humanity to reduce its dependence on burning fossil fuels. Penghao Xiao is a member of a team of researchers that has made Dal a global leader for battery science. “And when it’s on pasture, having a healthy dung beetle community there can provide numerous important benefits.” “If you look at a greenhouse gas profile of the livestock sector, a big part of that comes down to manure management,” says Dr. He hopes to demonstrate how an increase in tunnellers that push the dung into the earth can result in a decrease of greenhouse gas emissions and improve carbon storage in the soil. Manning is investigating how changes in environmental conditions can influence this beetle’s choice in nesting strategy. Tunnellers burrow up into the dung from underneath and pull the feces into underground nests.īut there is also a beetle that can go either way. Dwellers lay their eggs on cowpats where their larvae develop. Manning says there are two main kinds of beetles that breed in cow feces in Atlantic Canada – dwellers and tunnellers. That kills off the methanogens and helps reduce the environmental impact of pasture-based livestock production.” Dwellers vs tunnellers, and those in betweenĭr. “But when you add beetles to it that are tunnelling in, they are introducing little pockets of oxygen. “A dung pat is an oxygen poor environment, and there are microbes in there that continue to emit methane,” says Dr. He explains that in addition to the methane produced by the gassy ruminators, dung dropped in pastures continues to off-gas the climate-changing hydrocarbon. Manning says one of the most alarming consequences could be a diminished ability to mitigate the greenhouse gases generated by livestock production. “The big question that we are thinking about in my field is: ‘Okay, we see evidence that many insects are in decline – what does this mean for the health of our environment?’” says Paul Manning. “If the processes in the ocean that keep the CO2 in there change even in a subtle way, a small change in the carbon inventory of the ocean would mean a huge change in the atmosphere. “We have to get a handle on what the ocean’s carbon inventory is, how it is changing because the ocean holds 50 times more CO2 than the atmosphere,” she says. She says that even a slight decline in the ocean’s microscopic plant life may have dire consequences for ocean life and climate change. They soak up tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and act as a vehicle to cycle the gas into to the deep ocean where it is sequestered for centuries to millennia. Fennel says phytoplankton are the basis of the marine food web. A serious problem, because this means the nutrients from the bottom of the ocean that feed the microscopic plants at the top, the so-called phytoplankton, aren’t circulating there.ĭr. The fear is that global warming is causing the ocean to become increasingly stratified.
The floats are equipped with biogeochemical sensors that provide real time data on the presence of plankton biomass, nitrate, and oxygen in the water and how it is, or isn’t, circulating. Fennel is focused on readings from a new set of floats released in the last two years. Initially launched 20 years ago, the fleet of floats drift on ocean currents and dive to depths of up to 2,000 meters to provide feedback on how the ocean is moving and its chemical constituents.ĭr. To get the data she needs, she relies on readings beamed up to satellites by close to 4,000 submergible Argo floats that dot the ocean from the South Atlantic to the North Pacific and everywhere in between. Fennel is trying to get a handle on how the ocean is changing in its ability to cycle carbon and oxygen, because life below and above the water depends on it. At some point the ocean could become a source of CO2 for the atmosphere.”ĭr. But it’s not always going to continue to take up at that rate. “It really has mitigated global warming by taking up a lot of the fossil fuel carbon that we put into the atmosphere. “The ocean is a hugely important sink for carbon,” says Katja Fennel.