Lakes, carbon and microbes: a hidden world

While forests do a great job of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, as soon as the trees decompose, all that carbon goes straight back up again. And a new study has investigated how that decomposition works inside freshwater lakes. Scientists have found that what was traditionally just called "carbon" in a lake is actually a hugely diverse mix of different carbon-based molecules, which supports an equally diverse mix of microbes. And the more diverse everything is, the more greenhouse gases these lakes seem to pump out - which could be bad news if different species of trees react... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists