Farm Ponds Sequester Greenhouse Gases
https://eos.org/articles/farm-ponds-sequester-greenhouse-gases
Source: By Ty Burke, Eos/AGU.
Excerpt: The world’s farmers nourish their fields with more than 120 million metric tons of nitrogen-based fertilizer each year. ...A small percentage of the nitrogen in fertilizers is converted into nitrous oxide (N2O), a gas that accounts for about 5.6% of total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Nitrous oxide traps heat at about 300 times the rate of carbon dioxide and can comprise as much as half of a farm’s warming effects. In North America’s Great Plains, tens of thousands of farm ponds store water for livestock and irrigation,.... Researchers found that farm ponds “were undersaturated and were actually acting as N2O sinks, which was a big surprise.” ...The researchers sampled emissions from 101 farm ponds in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan and found that just over two thirds of them were acting as N2O sinks. Their results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America [https://www.pnas.org/content/116/20/9814.abstract]....
Source: By Ty Burke, Eos/AGU.
Excerpt: The world’s farmers nourish their fields with more than 120 million metric tons of nitrogen-based fertilizer each year. ...A small percentage of the nitrogen in fertilizers is converted into nitrous oxide (N2O), a gas that accounts for about 5.6% of total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Nitrous oxide traps heat at about 300 times the rate of carbon dioxide and can comprise as much as half of a farm’s warming effects. In North America’s Great Plains, tens of thousands of farm ponds store water for livestock and irrigation,.... Researchers found that farm ponds “were undersaturated and were actually acting as N2O sinks, which was a big surprise.” ...The researchers sampled emissions from 101 farm ponds in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan and found that just over two thirds of them were acting as N2O sinks. Their results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America [https://www.pnas.org/content/116/20/9814.abstract]....