gigaton
2
7.1
- noun
- /ˈɡɪɡəˌtɑn/
- Specialized
:
gigatonelada
- It will not solve global warming, because, since the industrial revolution over 100 years ago, over 1,000 gigatons of CO2 has been released into the Earth's atmosphere.
- gigatons of carbon
So what the the figures here you're seeing are gigatons of carbon.
- So what the the figures here you're seeing are gigatons of carbon.
Examples
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Hundreds of gigatons of carbon are going to be released from the East Siberian shelf alone.
Blog text (19) -
Using the most recent data available for 2010, the report puts current emissions at 54 gigatons (49 metric gigatons).
Blog text (32) -
These numbers are in boxes and those units would be in gigatons of carbon.
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So that net two gigaton rise per year may be increasing the pH or increasing the acidity of the ocean.
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Here's why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal.
Blog text (15) -
Carbon capture and storage potential, on the other hand, is projected at 417 gigatons, equivalent to 2,000 years' worth of storage.
Blog text (7) -
Stopping short of that line, according to the scientists, requires that we emit no more than 565 gigatons more carbon between now and 2050.
Blog text (4) -
Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable expectations.
Blog text (15) -
Scenarios of CO2 emissions for the next century range from some that at first rise from today's levels of roughly 6 gigatons of carbon per year, peak at around 10 gigatons, and then decline to zero by 2100, to others that continue to rise exponentially to 40 gigatons or more.
Academic text (2001) -
The scientist reported that the glacier is melting at a rate of about one gigaton of ice each year.
Synonyms
10
7.8
A unit of mass equal to one billion metric tonnes
How Heavy
Surface Forms
Morphology
gigaton = ton (transparent) = giga + ton
Formed by the productive SI prefix 'giga-' meaning 10^9 and the common noun 'ton', so the meaning 'one billion tons' is directly derivable.
Etymology
Gigaton starts with giga-, from an old Greek word meaning 'giant', and ends with ton, which means 'a large weight'. So a gigaton is literally 'a billion tons', and that is why scientists use it to talk about very large masses like carbon emissions or melting ice.