Photo: Ning Zeng.
An ancient log excavated and likely buried naturally, cleaned and dried, with the lower end sawed off for lab analysis.
And while we’re on the subject of reducing carbon in the atmosphere, consider an ancient process that works without our help. You may find it a little weird, however, especially as intentionally pursuing this natural approach merely postpones carbon escape for a few thousand years!
Dino Grandoni writes at the Washington Post, “On the outside, its rust-red bark had peeled. Its sweet, distinct cedar smell had disappeared. But at its core, it’s still as hard as a tabletop — and may just contain a way of slowing down rapidly rising temperatures.
“A 3,775-year-old log unintentionally discovered under a farm in Canada may point to a deceptively simple method of locking climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere for thousands of years, according to a study published [in September].
“ ‘This accidental discovery really gave a critical data point,’ said Ning Zeng, a University of Maryland climate scientist whose team unearthed the ancient chunk of wood. ‘It’s a single data point,’ he added, but it ‘provides the data point we need to really say under what conditions we can preserve wood for a thousand years or longer.’
“Figuring out ways of sequestering carbon may be crucial to meeting the world’s goal of halting warming beyond 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. … Doing something as simple as burying wood underground in the right spot, these researchers say, may be a cheap and scalable way of doing just that.
“Forests are Earth’s lungs, sucking up six times the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that people pump into the atmosphere every year by burning coal and other fossil fuels. But much of that carbon quickly makes its way back into the air once insects, fungi and bacteria chew through leaves and other plant material. …
“What if that decay could be delayed? Under the right conditions, tons of wood could be buried underground in wood vaults, locking in a portion of human-generated CO2 for potentially thousands of years. While other carbon-capture technologies rely on expensive and energy-intensive machines to extract CO2, the tools for putting wood underground are simple: a tractor and a backhoe.
“Finding the right conditions to impede decomposition over millennia is the tough part. To test the idea, Zeng worked with colleagues in Quebec to entomb wood under clay soil on a crop field about 30 miles east of Montreal.
“ ‘We were trying to do a small pilot project at first,’ said Ghislain Poisson, an agronomist with Quebec’s Agricultural Ministry who worked with Zeng. … But when the scientists went digging in 2013, they uncovered something unexpected: A piece of wood already buried about 6½ feet underground. The craggy, waterlogged piece of eastern red cedar appeared remarkably well preserved. …
“Radiocarbon dating revealed the log to be 3,775 years old, give or take a few decades. Comparing the old chunk of wood to a freshly cut piece of cedar showed the ancient log lost less than 5 percent of its carbon over the millennia.
“The log was surrounded by stagnant, oxygen-deprived groundwater and covered by an impermeable layer of clay, preventing fungi and insects from consuming the wood. Lignin, a tough material that gives trees their strength, protected the wood’s carbohydrates from subterranean bacteria. The team wrote up their results in a paper in the journal Science. …
“Said Daniel L. Sanchez, an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley who was not involved in the study, ‘Scientists and entrepreneurs have long contemplated burying wood as a climate solution.’
“The next step is to find prehistoric logs in other locations, to see how well other types of soil preserve wood. … The researchers estimate buried wood can sequester up 10 billion tons of CO2 per year, which is more than a quarter of annual global emissions from energy, according to the International Energy Agency.
“One of the biggest challenges isn’t so much the supply of wood but rather the cost of transporting it to the right spots, Poisson said. ‘There’s probably a lot of unmerchantable wood right now that doesn’t have any market or doesn’t have any purpose.’ “
Hmmm. What do you think? Transporting wood to a burial site wouldn’t just be costly, it would cause more emissions. Not sure the scientists have thought this through. More at the Post, here.
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