Build a labelled carbon cycle diagram with every reservoir, flux and arrow named. Switch to the nitrogen or phosphorus cycle, highlight a human perturbation, and read the residence time straight off the diagram.
Looking for the water cycle? It has its own page: Water Cycle Path Visualizer
The Carbon Cycle Diagram Generator draws a complete, labelled biogeochemical cycle for APES and general biology: pick carbon, nitrogen or phosphorus and see every reservoir, its stock, and the annual flux along every arrow between them.
Highlight a human perturbation — fossil-fuel combustion, deforestation or fertilizer runoff — and the affected arrows turn red while the readouts report what share of total cycle flux they carry. Arrow thickness is scaled to flux on a log scale, so the dominant pathways are visible at a glance.
The phosphorus cycle deliberately has no atmospheric reservoir, which is the classic exam contrast with carbon and nitrogen. The water cycle uses a different set of reservoirs and processes and has its own page: see the Water Cycle Path Visualizer at /tools/water-cycle-path-visualizer/.
A carbon cycle diagram shows the major carbon reservoirs — the atmosphere, land plants, soil, the ocean, fossil-fuel reserves and sedimentary rock — and the annual flux of carbon along every arrow between them, in petagrams of carbon per year.
Divide the reservoir's stock by the total flux leaving it. Atmospheric carbon is about 875 Pg C leaving at roughly 224 Pg C per year, which gives a residence time of about 3.91 years.
Phosphorus has no stable gaseous phase at Earth-surface conditions, so it moves through rock, soil, organisms and the ocean but never through the atmosphere. That absence is the standard exam contrast with the carbon and nitrogen cycles.
Haber-Bosch fertilizer manufacture fixes roughly 120 Tg N per year and fossil-fuel NOx deposition adds about 30 Tg N per year, together rivalling all natural terrestrial fixation. Leaching of that nitrogen into coastal waters drives eutrophication.
No. This generator covers the carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles only. The water cycle uses a different set of reservoirs and processes and has its own page: the Water Cycle Path Visualizer at /tools/water-cycle-path-visualizer/.
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