The Keeling Curve
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- Date Submitted: 04/05/2010 01:08 PM
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The Keeling Curve
Over fifty years ago, Charles David Keeling was the first man to measure and track the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He set up a gas analyzer on top of Hawaii's Mauna Loa that has been tracking the steady increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere released by the burning of fossil fuels.
The graph called the Mauna Loa curve, is also known today as “The Keeling Curve” and has come to be one of the most recognizeable images in modern science. Dr. Martin Heimann wrote in the science journal “Nature” that “If the world today realizes it has a problem and needs to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, it in large part owes this knowledge to Keeling's painstaking efforts.”
Of course Charles Keeling didn't just wake up one day and come up with this idea, he was actually a member of the Wilderness Society for much of his life before he ever started to think about recording global atmospheric carbon dioxide. While attending the University of Illinois Charles Keeling got hooked back country camping in the Cascades. A year later he was at Northwestern University and came across a book titled “Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch” by Richard Foster Flint. This possibility of pursuing a science career while spending time in his beloved mountains intrigued him to no end. “I imagined climbing mountains while measuring the physical properties of glaciers,” he later wrote, and chose a minor in geology. (Keeling, Paul)
Initially, Keeling set out to test whether carbonate in rivers and ground waters was in balance with carbon dioxide in the nearby air which required Keeling to sample sites remote from human sources of carbon dioxide. He began by designing a manometer that measured carbon dioxide more accurately than methods used in the past. Keeling then formulated a method for measuring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continuously. After taking a position at Scripps, he initiated and supervised carbon dioxide...
Over fifty years ago, Charles David Keeling was the first man to measure and track the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He set up a gas analyzer on top of Hawaii's Mauna Loa that has been tracking the steady increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere released by the burning of fossil fuels.
The graph called the Mauna Loa curve, is also known today as “The Keeling Curve” and has come to be one of the most recognizeable images in modern science. Dr. Martin Heimann wrote in the science journal “Nature” that “If the world today realizes it has a problem and needs to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, it in large part owes this knowledge to Keeling's painstaking efforts.”
Of course Charles Keeling didn't just wake up one day and come up with this idea, he was actually a member of the Wilderness Society for much of his life before he ever started to think about recording global atmospheric carbon dioxide. While attending the University of Illinois Charles Keeling got hooked back country camping in the Cascades. A year later he was at Northwestern University and came across a book titled “Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch” by Richard Foster Flint. This possibility of pursuing a science career while spending time in his beloved mountains intrigued him to no end. “I imagined climbing mountains while measuring the physical properties of glaciers,” he later wrote, and chose a minor in geology. (Keeling, Paul)
Initially, Keeling set out to test whether carbonate in rivers and ground waters was in balance with carbon dioxide in the nearby air which required Keeling to sample sites remote from human sources of carbon dioxide. He began by designing a manometer that measured carbon dioxide more accurately than methods used in the past. Keeling then formulated a method for measuring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continuously. After taking a position at Scripps, he initiated and supervised carbon dioxide...