The discovery of a nearly 4,000-year-old piece of wood suggests that helping to reduce carbon in our atmosphere may be a simple matter of burying items to slow down decomposition.
As detailed by ThePrint, the journey began in 2013, when researchers found a log of eastern red cedar covered in clay soil and 6 feet underground in Saint-Pie, Quebec. After the team let the log dry for nine years, carbon dating revealed it was 3,775 years old.
Remarkably, a comparison to modern-day wood indicated the ancient log had only lost 5% of its carbon, leading researchers to conclude that burial could prove to be a nature-based method of sequestering carbon to support the 2015 Paris Agreement's goals of limiting warming global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
Pollution from dirty fuels is the primary cause of the accelerated warming of Earth, so transitioning away from them is crucial. Experts have also identified carbon capture as a solution that could play a major role in keeping the planet in balance.
According to the World Resources Institute, scientists estimate the global community will need to remove as much as 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air annually by 2050.
The high cost is one hurdle to adopting carbon capture technologies. However, among the more economical emerging solutions are a reactor from Minnesota company Carba that pulls carbon from the air and turns it into a coal-like substance (without water waste or contamination) and a Bill Gates–based startup that sequesters carbon in plant-based bricks.
Now, the ancient log suggests another low-cost carbon capture method is on the horizon.
The findings, published in the journal Science, explain that photosynthesis eliminates around 220 gigatonnes of CO2 from the air every year, yet natural decomposition processes send much of that back into the atmosphere, as reported by ThePrint. Burying even a small percentage of trees, plants, and other types of biomatter could result in a significant reduction.
Researchers believe that their method of carbon capture would cost $100 to $200 per 1.1 tons of CO2 over the first 10 years. After scaling up, it could be as cheap as $30 to $100 per 1.1 tons. (Citing the study, ThePrint notes that direct air capture generally costs $100 to $300 per 1.1 tons.)
Researchers still need to investigate other wood and soil types to determine the wide-scale viability of the carbon capture method, but they believe it could ultimately be a key part of responsible forest management.
"In practice, it can be incorporated into a sustainable forest management plan, providing a new income source for a struggling industry and local communities around the world," the study's authors wrote, per ThePrint.
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