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Bonding with

The Carbon Cycle

Carbon.  All organic life forms that we know of are made of it.  It's one of the building blocks of life as we know it and potentially life throughout the known universe.  It's also apparently the primary cause for a noticeable rise in planetary temperature and a host of other factors due to its heat-trapping effects in the Earth's atmosphere.  But carbon doesn't just sit around in our bodies and in our air.  Even now, carbon moves throughout our planet in a biogeochemical cycle just like our friends water and nitrogen.  Before we dive into how it moves, though, it may be worth investigating why it's so important.
Let's dive in!

Carbon cycle.jpg
By Diagram adapted from U.S. DOE, Biological and Environmental Research Information System. - http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCycle/, Public Domain, Link

Why is Carbon so Important?

As mentioned, carbon is an essential part of organic life on Earth.  Scientists specialized in matter throughout the universe tend to think that this is case not only on our planet, but across galaxies and beyond.  We've found that carbon is abundant not only on Earth, but in all manner of space-faring objects.  Quantity isn't really a defining factor in organic life, though.  I mean, we don't have hydrogen- and oxygen-based life forms despite their abundance (though those do play important factors in life on Earth).
​
What makes us believe carbon is so important to organic life is not in quantity of the element, but quality of it.  Specifically, its ability to bond with other elements.  Furthermore, to bond and remain stable.  Without getting into the chemical nitty-gritty, the way carbon's valence (outer) electrons are situated makes it eager to bond with other elements.  This includes other carbon molecules, all without sacrificing the stability of the resulting chain of matter.  So, it isn't so much that carbon has a "living" quality to it, but its ability to bond in seemingly countless ways allows for any number of permutations to potentially form organic life.
Carbon is uniquely stable while supporting bonds with many other elements, making it a prime candidate in structuring living organisms
In a way, I suppose that comes back to a quantitative importance of carbon.  It's both abundant and abundantly friendly with so many other elements that it can form countless bonds which will statistically result in a stable organic life form.

We should mention that carbon has at least one other contender as an element capable of structuring organic life: silicon.  Silicon is just about as bond-happy as carbon is, but it is a heavier element which feeds into its bonds being less stable.  Sci-fi authors have been theorizing silicon-based life forms for years, feeding off of this concept, but we've not observed any such thing to this day.
Carbon is abundant and it is strongly thought that all life in the universe depends on it

Where is Carbon?

Okay, we now know that carbon is pretty important.  Organic life needs its ability to form strong, stable bonds in order to survive.  We also said it's abundant, so where is it on Earth?  The short answer is, well...everywhere!

Carbon, like our other cycles, has a concept of reservoirs, or places where carbon is stored and moved between.  We also have the concept of "sinks" or places where carbon is pulled from the cycle as readily available for a time.  Primarily, though, carbon is moving between various reservoirs.  These being the hydrosphere (water), atmosphere (the air around us), biosphere (the living parts of the planet), and geosphere (the inorganic parts of the planet).
The hydrosphere holds carbon in two primary ways: in a more or less constant equilibrium between the ocean surface and the atmosphere, and sunk deep in our marine ecosystems.  The atmosphere holds the planet's store of airborne carbon in the form of carbon dioxide.  The biosphere holds carbon within the bodies of living organisms.  This carbon can also be retained and pulled into the Earth after the creature's life is over.  The geosphere is the most inert reservoir, holding carbon within rock.

How Does Carbon Move?

Most of that probably sounds pretty stationary, and, to be fair, this cycle moves a lot slower than something like the water cycle.  With the exception of the atmosphere and the surface carbon in the oceans, carbon can stay in one spot for years, decades, or centuries.  The planet was built to handle carbon as a slow cycle, but it does move!

As mentioned, the oceans like to trade carbon with the atmosphere almost constantly.  There is a certain equilibrium that the hydrosphere and atmosphere work toward, but as the planet changes in both how fast carbon is moving and where the most carbon is stored, this balance fluctuates.  Nonetheless, carbon is moving in this interaction.  From the atmosphere, our good friend plants like to pull carbon dioxide out of the air in into themselves via photosynthesis.  This process allows the plant to grow.  For our herbaceous examples, this carbon is either pulled into the Earth after a plant has gone through its life, or is eaten by other life forms.
Carbon is housed in the Earth's water, air, land, and all living things.

​It may move slow, but it is always moving!
In the soil, this decaying life form undergoes a compost reaction.  The soil can respire carbon back into the atmosphere (that's right, soil can exhale too!), or just hold large deposits of carbon deep within the Earth (we'll be coming back to this one later).  The plants that were consumed move their carbon around the biosphere by contributing to the growth of other life forms until they too reach the end of their life.  All throughout these non-plant lives, they exhale carbon back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
Getting carbon our of the geosphere is a normally massive task.

Carbon sediments are pulled into the Earth's mantle and combusted into the atmosphere via volcano!
The slowest of the movement comes in the deep marine and geosphere reservoirs.  Getting into the geosphere is a generally of a process of time, carbon deposits, and usually some help from water.  Carbon deposits will, over time, cement themselves to existing rock structures.  There are also marine creatures that can pull calcium carbonate from ocean water to form their skeletons and shells which, after a time, will become carbon deposits of their own.  Getting out of the geosphere is a bit tougher, but comes down to combustion, such that solid carbon forms are released into the air as carbon dioxide.  Carbon sediment can find its way into volcanoes via subduction in the deepest marine ecosystems...or...

Enter the Human

Humans can help move it faster!  Since the industrial revolution, humans have discovered a way to harness energy from carbon that they have found around the Earth.  This way is, of course, combustion, which is a means to take carbon locked in the geosphere and release it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.  Our discovery, however, has led us to do two things very quickly.  First, we find long term carbon stores in the soil and geosphere and burn them, and second, chop down a great deal of one of Earth's best carbon sequesters: forests.
Doing one of these things on their own would likely be enough to put the Earth's systems into a state of imbalance, but doing both of these has some downstream effects.  We mentioned earlier that carbon dioxide has a heat-trapping quality in our atmosphere.  It's why we call it a "greenhouse" gas.  Just the act of burning long-locked carbon would push more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but we also happened to start clearing trees at around the same time in the name of fuel and agriculture to sustain an ever growing population.  At once, we starting pushing more carbon into a reservoir not built to handle locking carbon long term AND removed a chunk of the biosphere responsible for moving that carbon to new other reservoirs.
Earth is what is called a closed system.  Elements on our planet rarely leave the planet.  The amount of carbon on Earth is not changing, but where it is stored is changing dramatically.  This change is causing the planet's average temperature to rise, altering the local climates of ecosystems and causing balances to shift.  For example, the ocean surface's equilibrium will start to shift to push more carbon into the atmosphere as the ocean's acidity rises.  The climbing temperature in conjunction with other human practices have shown us that acidic oceans are bad for both life in the ocean and its capability to hold as much carbon as it does today.  Climbing temperatures also heavily impact our arctic regions, which are now unintentionally exposing carbon sinks embedded in permafrost, pushing more carbon into the atmosphere that we're not utilizing for any benefit.
Humans have altered both the amount of carbon pushed into the atmosphere while removing forests to pull carbon out of the air impacting the balance of Earth's systems
Needless to say, unintended human tampering with the carbon cycle has caused a number of effects that don't bode well for life on the planet.  But as we learn the effects we have, smart people are putting their minds together to start addressing these issues.  We know that we have to do a few things: maximize the effect of existing natural carbon sinks and sequesters, enhance existing systems where we can without causing more harm, and reduce our overall carbon emissions to give the atmosphere a chance to recover from our activity.

​Of course, where there are people trying to help the planet, there will always be people who profit off of the existing paradigms that refuse to let go.  We must continue to make steps in a progressive direction to restore balance or at least move the needle back a bit from where we are today.  Understanding why carbon is important, how it moves, and where it stays are all integral ways to be informed of the human impact and realize that it's time we start pushing for new ways to thrive.  While it would be easy to consider the planet a lost cause and a failed experiment, I don't think the vast majority of humanity wants to see our home destroyed by ignorance and greed.  With that, I'm hopeful we can keep learning and find ways to better interact with our home.​
~ And, as always, don't forget to keep wondering ~
Prismatic Planet
Sources
* Why Carbon is Important to Organic Life:
"Astrobiology". Biology Cabinet. September 26, 2006. Retrieved 2020-09-12.

* Carbon Cycle and Sequestration:
McPherson, B., & Sundquist, E. (2013). Carbon Sequestration and Its Role in the Global Carbon Cycle, Volume 183 (pp. 1-24).

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