Scientists in Lausanne have found that streams and rivers – or “running waters” – emit on average four times more carbon dioxide (CO2) at night than during the day. The results have implications for how the global carbon cycle is calculated. The research, carried out by a team from the Stream and Biofilm and Ecosystem Research Laboratory (SBER) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) - along with international colleagues - was published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Friday. That more CO2 was emitted at night “indicates that calculations of how much CO2 is released by these waters to the atmosphere has been biased too low, leading to incorrect estimates of their contribution to the global carbon cycle”, an EPFL statement said. Until now estimates of CO2 - the main greenhouse gas - from running waters have been based on people manually getting samples from the water. And that’s where the SBER scientists spotted the calculation bias. They found that 90%...
