MIT News October 24, 2024 Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are organic molecules containing adjacent aromatic rings. Infrared emission bands show that PAHs are abundant in space, but only a few specific PAHs have been detected in the interstellar medium. An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, University of Michigan, Worcester State University, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Harvard Smithsonian, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Virginia Military Institute, University of Virginia, Canada) detected 1-cyanopyrene, a cyano-substituted derivative of the related four-ring PAH pyrene, in radio observations of the dense cloud TMC-1. They estimated that pyrene contains up to 0.1% of the […]
Tag Archives: Carbon storage
Declines in plant resilience threaten carbon storage in the Arctic
Phys.org October 10, 2024 Rapid warming and increasing disturbances in high-latitude regions have caused extensive vegetation shifts and uncertainty in future carbon budgets. Better predictions of vegetation dynamics and functions require characterizing resilience, which indicates the capability of an ecosystem to recover from perturbations. A team of researchers in the US (The Ohio State University, University of Utah, Northern Arizona University) used temporal autocorrelation of remotely sensed greenness to quantify time-varying vegetation resilience during 2000–2019 across northwestern North American Arctic-boreal ecosystems. They found that vegetation resilience significantly decreased in southern boreal forests, including forests showing greening trends, while it increased […]