The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has just carried out a study that discovered forests actually absorb more carbon dioxide than scientists thought.

The study estimates tropical forests absorb as much as 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide out of a total global absorption of 2.5 billion metric tons. This rate is far larger than the amount absorbed by forests in Canada, Siberia, and other northern boreal forest regions.

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David Schimel of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said this is good news as the uptake in boreal forests has slowed down. Tropical forests, on the other hand, may continue to take up carbon for many more years to come.

The report said forests and other land vegetation currently remove up to 30 percent of human carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere during photosynthesis.

Therefore, if the rate of absorption were to slow down, the rate of global warming will then speed up in return.

The study is the first to devise a way to make direct comparisons of carbon dioxide estimates from many sources and at different scales.

Through these comparisons, scientists were able to obtain their new estimate of tropical carbon absorption.

"It has big implications for our understanding of whether global terrestrial ecosystems might continue to offset our carbon dioxide emissions or might begin to exacerbate climate change," said co-author Britton Stephens of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

With every new piece of technology humans use that subsequently add to emissions, forests worldwide are also using these emissions to grow faster and reduce the amount of airborne emissions.

The effect is called carbon fertilization. Schimel says the effect is stronger at higher temperatures. This is why the rate of absorption is higher in the tropics than in boreal forests.

TagsNASA, Tropical Forests, Absorption, carbon dioxide