Wetlands Climatology
Wetlands play a vital role in stabilizing earth's climates and surface temperatures according to physics, climatology and hydrologists. Evaporation adds water vapor to the surrounding area raising humidity. The mitigating effect is magnified as water evaporates, cooling the water left behind in the pool. This principal is used in evaporative coolers and in the human body, sweating cools the skin. Wetlands, therefore, modify local temperatures by cooling in warm weather and warming in cold weather. The vaporized water is a greenhouse gas, as it can hold a great amount of heat from escaping back into space especially in an inversion. However, after forming clouds, water vapor reflective power is far more powerful than the small amount of greenhouse gasses by returning sun energy back into space thereby cooling earth.
Wetlands were once drained and dried to increase human activity and now, reduced wetlands much like reduced rainforests, add to global warming. One reason to avoid using these areas is they are prone to flooding. Many remaining wetlands are in jeopardy of being lost even though they have a significant economic value and loosing them would greatly increase climate instability. New Orleans is a prime example of this type of low lying area that was drained and now relies on levies to control flooding. Much of the wetlands have been lost or abused by dredging, dumping and filling. After draining the land, the area has a tendency to shrink and fall as the soil compacts and is baked by the sun. With the peak of fossil fuels, bringing on new forms of energy, that are in the planning stages, wetlands will play a vital role in growing new fuels, electrical generation and drinking water storage.
Wetlands are found globally, but only make up a small percent of Earth's surface. Unique characteristics are abundant as wetlands vary widely from tropics to polar arctic regions. Defining wetlands is not straightforward because some of the most important wetlands are only seasonally wet or temporarily flooded areas. Finding familiar shared features between many wetlands is difficult but not impossible. Many wetlands are the connection between water and land. These watersheds have a wide spectrum of vegetation covering the landscape leading to diverse wildlife habitats. Marshlands, swamplands, water storage, seasonally flooded rivers, new river flows, irrigated rice fields and small hydroelectric dam waterways whether flooded or non-flooded absorb water, hold sediment and decomposing vegetation.
However, these features explain why wetlands are a large source of methane. The flow of water, the cycling of nutrients and the energy of the sun meet to produce a unique ecosystem. Organic materials are anaerobic digested to form methane by microbes called methanogens. Methane producers work in the absence of oxygen aided by the breakdown of soils. When water fills spaces among soil particles, as it does in wet and flooded soils, oxygen is in short supply and methanogens thrive. Wetlands account for about thirty percent of methane emitted from Earth's surface to the atmosphere each year. (Another reason this is such a large percentage is termites live on wet cellulose, mostly wood, many live in wetlands and generate methane in their digestion process.) While wetlands are a small area of earth's surface, its methane production is huge. Methane is another powerful greenhouse gasses. Therefore, mining these gasses with Atmospheric Cleanup MachinesTM is vital. Consequently, understanding climatology, associated geochemical activities, and hydrology in wetlands is a high priority in climate research and modeling.
The stabilizing influence on weather is the most important role of wetlands. This is closely followed by the role wetlands play in the world's water cycle. These features are very important and life on earth as we know it is now dependent on wetlands survival. Protecting the whole system including land, air, and water resources is the only real approach to wetland protection. Given the predictions of a raising sea level with increased flooding from global warming, models will be verified of how much effect new wetlands have on earth surface temperature. My research shows doubling the amount of low methane producing wetlands now by increasing rice fields, hydroelectric dams, human drinking water storage reservoirs, corn fields, rain forests and other like activities, because of their stabilizing effect, could mitigate global warming for decades.
