unless you’re running When you walk barefoot, you experience heat waves due to the temperature. Scientists mostly track them that way, too. “Extreme heat has always been studied based on temperature,” said Almudena García-Garcia, an Earth system scientist at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research. That’s because it’s been done a lot.”
However, little research has been done on how heat waves ripple across the ground. This spread of heat can have major effects on the complex natural systems that grow our food, treat our water, and even sequester carbon. At some point, soil warming may actually occur. To contribute Temperatures rise in a kind of nasty climate feedback loop.
Late last month, Garcia-Garcia published Alarming findings published in a magazine nature climate change About extreme soil heat across central Europe. The researchers collected data on temperatures up to 2 meters (about 6 feet) above the ground and in the first 10 centimeters (or 4 inches) of soil in the same region from 1996 to 2021. At two-thirds of the approximately 120 measuring stations they used, extreme heat was more pronounced in the soil than in the air. For every 10 years, these temperature extremes were 0.7°C warmer in the soil compared to the air. The number of days the soil experienced extreme heat increased twice as fast.
“This paper raises many questions because we find that there are differences in the evolution of thermal extremes in the soil and the atmosphere,” Garcia-Garcia says. “Perhaps differences in the evolution of thermal events in soils, vegetation, and the atmosphere could help us understand or predict agricultural failures, biodiversity changes, or other climate change impacts on ecosystem activity. .”
The tricky thing about soil is that no two places in the world are the same. Some areas may have high clay or sand content. It may also contain more carbon from plants. One spot may be darker than another and absorb more of the sun’s energy. In some places, such as the Amazon rainforest, trees can block almost all the sunlight that hits the earth. However, in grasslands, more photons can be captured because the vegetation is sparse. In the far north or south, the angle of the sun is different from the equator. The topology is very diverse, ranging from completely flat to mountainous areas. The water table can be high in some places and low in others. Different microbial communities inhabit different soils, as do different invertebrates such as earthworms and insects. Huh. All these variables combine to determine how the soil heats up as the sun rises above the horizon.
The farmers everytime I’m concerned about soil temperature. If the crop is not planted at the right time, the seeds will not germinate. “The old adage among farmers here is that if you can put your bare butt on the soil and keep it comfortable for about 15 seconds, it’s good enough to plant,” said Andrew Margeno, a soil scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It’s a warm feeling.” He was not involved in the new paper. “It’s used as a joke now, but people understood things back in the day before they had these fancy tools.”
