Patrick Schultz

My friend Andy Jacobson, who works at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, CO, has put together this amazing animation of the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide since the beginning of the industrial revolution:

In case you were wondering what causes the fluctuations in the Northern hemisphere (the bouncing dots towards the right of the animated graph), it’s the effect of the terrestrial biosphere. Since most of the continental landmass is concentrated north of the equator, atmospheric CO2 decreases noticeably in the Northern hemisphere during the growing season as a result of photosynthetic uptake by plants. During the winter months, decay of organic material exceeds photosynthetic uptake of CO2, and atmospheric concentrations increase.

After a few years of struggling with slightly (?) unorganized editors at “Ecological Modelling”, my first paper is finally in press. The article that I co-wrote with my Master’s advisor Noel Urban is a modeling study of bacterial dynamics in lake sediments.

Click the image for a link to the paper (the full text version requires an institutional subscription or costs $30, sorry):