Squatting on spongy soil, a climate scientist laid a small cone-shaped device to “measure the breathing” of a peat bog in the northern part of Canada’s Quebec province.
Michelle Garneau, a university researcher and a member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was collecting the first data on areas flooded to build the new Romaine River hydroelectric dams in a bid to assess the project’s impact on the region.
While renewable hydroelectricity itself is considered to be one of the cleanest sources of energy on the planet, there is no proven model for calculating the greenhouse gas emissions released by flooding huge areas behind new dams.
Photo: AFP
With construction of four new dams on the Romaine River in northern Quebec nearly complete, researchers saw an opportunity to try out new techniques to measure its carbon footprint.
The team led by Garneau zeroed in on a swamp a mere stone’s throw from the raging river in the wilds of Canada’s boreal forest, an area accessible only by helicopter.
After landing, she took several boxes out of the belly of the aircraft and placed them next to some solar panels and a portable weather station that she and her students installed over the summer. The devices are expected to produce sample data within two years.
“Every 20 minutes, the cone will capture and measure the breathing of the soil,” Garneau said, placing a transparent device that resembles a handbell on the lichen, as wild geese honked and cackled overhead.
She took a few steps further on the unstable ground and placed a box that connects to sensors already sunk into the ground.
“This automated device to measure the photosynthetic activity records the [carbon dioxide] and methane emissions every three minutes, for hours,” the researcher said.
Carbon dioxide and methane emissions are the main sources of global warming.
Another team is measuring carbon dioxide emissions from artificial lakes created by flooding lands behind dams for eventual comparison.
About one-third of the world’s land area is covered by forests, which act as sinks for greenhouse gases.
Canada’s enormous boreal forest has trapped more than 300 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council said.
However, 10 to 13 percent of Canada’s boreal forest is covered by peatlands — wetlands with high levels of organic matter — and very little is known about them, said Garneau, research chair on peat ecosystems and climate change at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal.
Her work is supported by the province’s utility, Hydro-Quebec, whose dams — once the four additional hydropower plants on the Romaine River are turned on next year — are to supply 90 percent of Quebec’s power needs.
The data collected in this study should “serve the IPCC and the advancement of science in general” by helping to better peg the carbon footprint of flooded wilderness, Garneau told reporters.
The information is crucial as several new big hydroelectric projects are due to come online in the coming years, including in Canada, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Laos, Tajikistan and Zimbabwe.
“We’re creating artificial reservoirs around the world, but GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions from hydroelectricity are not well-accounted for,” university biologist Paul Del Giorgio said.
“There are some dams in tropical zones that emit as many greenhouse gases as coal plants,” due to the accelerated decomposition of drowned organic materials, the Argentine researcher said.
Del Giorgio and his students are complementing Garneau’s research by taking water samples from flooded lands behind dams that are analyzed in a field laboratory set up in Havre-Saint-Pierre’s town hall.
Both data sets are to be plugged into a complex set of equations to determine the volume of greenhouse gas emissions from dams.
The first results of their work are expected next year and are highly anticipated by climate scientists worldwide, Garneau said.
The IPCC desperately needs “to have better models for better predicting climate change,” she said.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
The New Taiwan dollar and Taiwanese stocks surged on signs that trade tensions between the world’s top two economies might start easing and as US tech earnings boosted the outlook of the nation’s semiconductor exports. The NT dollar strengthened as much as 3.8 percent versus the US dollar to 30.815, the biggest intraday gain since January 2011, closing at NT$31.064. The benchmark TAIEX jumped 2.73 percent to outperform the region’s equity gauges. Outlook for global trade improved after China said it is assessing possible trade talks with the US, providing a boost for the nation’s currency and shares. As the NT dollar
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS