Now an international team of U.S. and German scientists, including some funded by the National Science Foundation, have used carbon-14 dating techniques to determine that most of that carbon is fairly young and not likely to affect the balance of global climate.

They reported their findings in the March issue of Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.

Although the current carbon load does not seem likely to affect global climate significantly, they caution in their report that a well-documented Arctic warming trend could result in ancient carbon-a reservoir of the gas currently locked into peat bogs-being added to the mix and contributing to the well- documented Arctic warming trend.

"If current warming trends in the Arctic continue, we can expect to see more of the old carbon now sequestered in northern soils enter the carbon cycle as carbon dioxide. This will act as a positive feedback, tending to enhance the greenhouse effect and accelerate global warming," said Ronald Benner, an NSF-funded researcher at the University of South Carolina.

NSF is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, with an annual budget of nearly $5.58 billion. National Science Foundation funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 universities and institutions.

The team studied rivers in northern Russia and Alaska, along with the Arctic Ocean itself. Benner conducted some of his research as part of the Western Shelf-Basin Interactions research project, which is jointly funded by NSF and the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

Previously, scientists had not known the age of the carbon that reaches the ocean. Was it recently derived from contemporary plant material, or had it been locked in soils for hundreds or thousands of years and therefore not part of Earth's recent carbon cycle?

The new findings complement recently published work by Laurence C. Smith, an NSF-funded researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, indicating that massive Siberian peat bogs, widely known as the permanently frozen home of untold kilometers of moss and uncountable hordes of mosquitoes, also are huge repositories for gases that are thought to play an important role in the Earth's climate balance.

Those gases, carbon dioxide and methane, are known to trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere, but the enormous amounts of the gases contained in the bogs haven't previously been accounted for in climate-change models.

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