On the outside, its rust-red bark had peeled. Its sweet, distinct cedar smell had disappeared.
“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, which scientists agree is necessary for forestalling the most disastrous consequences of climate change.
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.
An ‘otherworldly’ piece of wood
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. Even wood, the hardiest part of a tree, will succumb within a few decades to these decomposers.
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.
