The world’s wetlands are in danger and if they are damaged further they could release a “carbon bomb” which could greatly affect Global Warming conditions.

Wetlands are natural carbon traps that contain the same amount of carbon that is currently in the earth’s atmosphere, in all they contain a fifth of the world’s carbon.

Wetlands come in various guises. They can be swamps, marshes, river deltas, arctic tundra and lagoons.

They produce 25 percent of the world’s food, purify water, recharge aquifers and serve as buffers against violent costal storms.

The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina was due, in part, to the human alteration of the Mississippi River delta. Without the natural barriers of the former wetlands water was able to surge up the river’s delta and flood major portions of New Orleans causing extensive building damage and social dislocation.

Human interference has reduced the Earth’s wetlands by 60 percent during the last century. Most of the wetlands were drained to provide agricultural land. Some were destroyed by pollution, construction of dams or canals and urban development.

Today wetlands account for 6 percent of the Earth’s land mass and if they are disturbed they could release huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

“We call it the carbon bomb,” said Paulo Teixeira, coordinator of a major wetlands conference recently held in Brazil. “It’s a very tricky situation.”

Seven hundred international scientists attended the meeting in search of ways to protect the endangered wetlands.

“Too often in the past, people have unwittingly considered wetlands to be a problem in need of a solution, yet wetlands are essential to the Planet’s health,” said Konrad Osterwalder, a United Nations under secretary attending the Brazilian Wetlands conference.

As humans continue to contribute to Global Warming the environment begins to have an effect on the wetlands. A warmer Earth contributes to wetland water evaporation and rising sea levels could change the salinity of the wetland water or completely engulf them.

Global Warming is also softening up the Arctic tundra which is a frozen wetland containing billions of tonnes of carbon. As the tundra warms it releases carbon that contributes to its own destruction.

The melting of the permafrost maybe “unstoppable,” said another conference participant, Eugene Turner of Louisianna State University.

The conference decided that the wetland image was a conceptual problem with the general public. Organizer Teixeira said that people were ready to save rain forests but were ill disposed towards saving swamps.