Snowpacks

Smaller snowpacks are silver lining in the cloud of recent drought years

ALLEN BEST


BOULDER - It turns out that even drought can have a silver lining, one that reduces global warming.

Scientists from the University of Colorado-Boulder say thinner snowpacks, such as those experienced in recent years in the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, result in less insulation of forest soils, cooling them and slowing the metabolism of microbes within the soils.

With larger snowpacks, those microbes are working harder and release large amounts of carbon dioxide, one of the key greenhouse gases attributed to the world's warming climate.

"I view this as a small amount of good news in a large cloud of bad news," said Russell Monson, a professor in the university's ecology and evolutionary biology department. Results of the study appeared in the journal Nature. The experiments were conducted on Niwot Ridge, which is located on the Front Range between Boulder and Granby.

Additional research at Niwot Ridge by other scientists finds that spring has been arriving up to a month earlier due to warmer temperatures. Increased heat and less moisture stresses the trees, resulting in them being able to absorb less carbon dioxide. Monson noted that more carbon is stored in forests, in hilly or mountainous terrain, than other ecosystems.

Carbon dioxide levels hovered at around 250 parts per million for thousands of years, but began climbing rapidly with the Industrial Revolution which began in the 1700s. Current levels are at 380 parts per million.