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Glossary of Terms

Carbon Cycle
The eternal cycle where the element known as carbon constantly flows throughout the environment. The total amount of carbon in the earth’s system remains constant, and it flows along pathways between the earth’s major carbon reservoirs – the biosphere (soil, freshwater, and all living things), the atmosphere, oceans, and geological sediments (also including fossil fuels compressed into coal beds, oil fields, etc.). Animals exhale carbon dioxide, for example, while plants and trees remove it from the atmosphere. The dynamic of the carbon cycle is not a simple linear pathway of cause and effect; instead, it is an immensely complicated and interrelated system, at once both chaotic yet orderly. During the two hundred years or so of industrialization, human activities such as burning fossil fuels have disproportionately altered the natural ebb and flow of the carbon cycle (see anthropogenic climate change, or human climate forcing). One major effect has been to redistribute carbon from soil and sediments to the atmosphere and ocean. These shifts in the carbon cycle have also affected the biosphere. The result has been global warming and climate change, beyond the parameters of normal variations.
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