Deserts are big. About 40% of the Earth's land surface is considered "arid" or "semi-arid" and deserts occur on every continent on Earth: The Sahara, Kalahari and Namib in Africa; large parts of central Australia; the Gobi and Arabian Deserts in Asia; the Atacama in South America; the Chihuahuan, Sonoran, and Mojave Deserts in the United States; and most of Antarctica, among others. Worldwide, over 1 billion people live in arid lands and they are experiencing some of the fastest population growth in the world.
Climate models predict that many deserts are likely to get hotter and drier in the coming decades and this is likely to have big effects on the people and other organisms that live in these already resource-scarce areas. Understanding the basics of how desert ecosystems function will help us do a better job developing strategies to deal with the challenges facing arid lands around the world.
Climate models predict that many deserts are likely to get hotter and drier in the coming decades and this is likely to have big effects on the people and other organisms that live in these already resource-scarce areas. Understanding the basics of how desert ecosystems function will help us do a better job developing strategies to deal with the challenges facing arid lands around the world.
My job is to study microorganisms that live in one of the driest places on the planet to understand how they change their environment and how this impacts our lives. When plants and animals die, they start to decompose; anyone who’s walked through a forest and seen rotting logs knows this. The reason they decompose is because billions of tiny bacteria and fungi eat the dead plants and break them down into simpler molecules.
Similar to how you and I breathe out carbon dioxide as we live, bacteria and fungi do the same thing when they decompose plants. Since carbon dioxide is one of the most important greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, our ability to understand how the world’s climate is changing depends on us knowing not just how much carbon dioxide our cars and power plants are producing but also how much carbon dioxide is being produced by these trillions and trillions of organisms that are decomposing things around the world.
We have a pretty good idea how this process works and how much carbon dioxide is produced when things decompose in relatively wet environments like forests (since lots of university researchers live in these places), but we still don’t have a good understanding how decomposition works in arid lands like deserts even though they cover more than a third of the Earth’s land surface. So I study the process of how dead plants decompose in some of the world’s driest deserts so we can better understand how much carbon dioxide they are putting into the air and figure out how much they contribute to global climate change.
Similar to how you and I breathe out carbon dioxide as we live, bacteria and fungi do the same thing when they decompose plants. Since carbon dioxide is one of the most important greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, our ability to understand how the world’s climate is changing depends on us knowing not just how much carbon dioxide our cars and power plants are producing but also how much carbon dioxide is being produced by these trillions and trillions of organisms that are decomposing things around the world.
We have a pretty good idea how this process works and how much carbon dioxide is produced when things decompose in relatively wet environments like forests (since lots of university researchers live in these places), but we still don’t have a good understanding how decomposition works in arid lands like deserts even though they cover more than a third of the Earth’s land surface. So I study the process of how dead plants decompose in some of the world’s driest deserts so we can better understand how much carbon dioxide they are putting into the air and figure out how much they contribute to global climate change.