The ill-influence of global warming goes far beyond making our ice creams melt quicker, time and strenuous amounts of research have painstakingly shown. As a result, researchers from just about every scientific discipline — from agriculture to astronomy — have begun reporting climate change’s meddling in recent times.
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The latest worry comes from the little critters that frolic within our soils. Ecologists are worried that the increased frequency and intensity of droughts might disrupt carbon-capturing soil microbes, which could be the first domino towards ecological disaster.
Earth has a tremendous amount of carbon, but only a fraction exists in our atmosphere, as most of it has been diligently fixed into our soil by the hard-working hands of soil microbes.
However, climate change-worsened drought has begun putting disproportionate stress on these various carbon-fixing tiny organisms. Even India reels under severe drought-like conditions; some sources have shown that the drought-prone area in the country has increased by over 50% since 1997.
“Soil microbes are beneficial, and we couldn’t live without their cycling of carbon and nutrients, but climate change and drought can tweak that balance, and we have to be aware of how it’s changing,” explains Steven Allison, an ecology expert.
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These new increasingly-common arid conditions could severely hamper the productivity of soil microbes and favour some species over others. As Allison explained, many microbes are crucial in helping recycle nutrients in the soil, which plants are excruciatingly dependent on.
All in all, this means that we can’t say bye-bye to microbes without saying bye-bye to a plethora of plant species in the area as well.
Finally, while many microbes help sequester carbon from decomposing plants in the soil, many also release carbon back into the atmosphere. Therefore, if droughts somehow favour the carbon-releasing species, this could spell further disaster for the looming climate conundrum.
“From a climate mitigation standpoint, what we want is for more carbon to be in plants and soils and less carbon to be in the atmosphere,” Allison explains. “So the more carbon we can absorb into plants through photosynthesis and the more we can transfer and keep in the soil, the better off we’re going to be in terms of climate change.”
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However, there’s a silver lining. As a result of them being much simpler organisms, microbes are extremely adaptable, even more so than plants. This could also help us engineer microbes to help plants cope better with droughts, tipping the delicate balance ever so slightly in the right direction. There is vast potential here.
“We also need more measurements to get a good sense of how drought affects soil carbon change in different ecosystems,” Allison continues. “There’s a lot of landscape out there — from the Arctic tundra to the deserts — and we could use more research across those diverse habitats.”
