Dr. Jared Deforest, associate professor for environmental and plant biology at Ohio University, kicked off the first Science Café talk of Spring Semester with an interactive presentation of his recent, innovative research. He began his speech, officially labeled “Chemical Climate Change and Sustainability,” by asking the audience, “What is climate and what is climate change?”
After a mixture of shouted and muttered answers, Deforest responded, “It’s also about the changing chemical environment of our planet.” He then began to tell a story of immense change in a place very relevant to his audience, Southeast Ohio. His story begins with the massive widespread burning of fossil fuels specifically for electricity (although transportation plays a role as well), and ends with a totally new chemical environment.
Acid deposition in America due to the burning of fossil fuels has greatly decreased since 1996 after increased regulation targeted the issue in the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. The Ohio River Valley remains a hotspot due to the area’s abundance of coal-fired power plants pumping acidic nitrogen and sulfur compounds into the atmosphere. No, these elements are not causing the temperature to increase, but they are greatly altering the chemical and biological composition of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.
To illustrate the consequences of acid rain, Deforest passed around cups of local soil and squirt bottles of 10 percent hydrochloric acid and asked the audience to add the acid to the soil and observe. He informed the audience that the bubbles they were observing were releasing calcium carbonate into the atmosphere, a natural process that human activity is accelerating. The release of calcium from soil due to the addition of acid rain results in prematurely aging soil as well as the decreased accessibility of usable phosphorus in the soil for plants.
Plants must depend more heavily on their “fungi partners” to help them extract the inaccessible element from the altered soil to continue flowering and producing seeds (both requirements of reproduction). If a plant lacks the appropriate fungi interactions to absorb adequate amounts of phosphorus, it will not survive in this new environment.
Successful partners will increase in prevalence and have simplified root structures due to their dependence on partners instead of roots for nutrient uptake. As the composition of the environment shifts, so must its inhabitants. Some species will flourish in this new chemical climate, and others will likely perish. Natural and induced ecological succession results in both winners and losers, determined by which species possesses the most favorable characteristics.
Deforest admittedly doesn’t know the full implications of his research yet because his studies are fairly early and localized to the Ohio River Valley. The connected stories of acid rain, shifting systems, and climate change itself are all lacking something very important: an ending.
Deforest plans to continue his research and assured his audience of his confidence that life will not cease to exist due to the Earth’s changing climate. However, he made perfectly clear life as we know it might do just that.
Alex Slaymaker is a junior studying environmental planning and policy at Ohio University.
