Unlike truck and SUV traffic, a logging raft in the Mackenzie Delta in Nunavut, Canada is storing carbon.
Covering an area of about 51 square kilometers (nearly 20 square miles), it is the largest accretionary fallow known on Earth, consisting of fallen trees from the surrounding forests that floated to the surface of the water downstream and accumulated in the delta. over the centuries.
These forests collectively hold about 3.4 million tons (3.1 million metric tons) of carbon, a large but poorly understood reservoir of carbon, according to a new study by US and UK scientists.
“To put this into perspective, we would say that this is about 2.5 million tons of vehicle emissions per year. That’s a lot of carbon,” says Alicia Cendrowski, a research engineer who led the study at Colorado State University in the US.
And despite decades of data on how driftwood moves across the Arctic, we still don’t know how much wood is the main cause of crises in the region, or how much carbon it contains.
“We’ve been working a lot on carbon fluxes from water and sediment, but until recently we just didn’t pay attention to wood,” says Virginia Ruiz Villanueva, a geomorphologist at the University of Lausanne who was not involved in the study. … It is important to study this wood, not only in relation to the carbon cycle, but in general, to understand how natural river systems work and how rivers mobilize and distribute wood.”
Wood has a long shelf life in the Arctic, where low temperatures and low humidity can help keep trees alive for centuries or even thousands of years after they fall.
The Mackenzie River abounds in stems of all ages, especially in the delta, the third largest river in the world by area. For the new study, the researchers surveyed about 13,000 square kilometers of the delta, in what was the most ambitious mapping effort ever.
This included three weeks in the field, during which the researchers measured driftwood, mapped blocks, and took samples to determine the age of individual records using radiocarbon dating.
They also used satellite imagery to estimate the total area, which is a collection of about 400,000 small tree deposits. This helped them calculate the volume of wood in the borehole, and therefore the amount of carbon it could store. The largest stock at the cul-de-sac covers an area equivalent to about 20 American football fields and stores 7,385 tons (6,700 metric tons) of carbon, the researchers said.
And while their research shows that the total watershed contains 3.4 million tons of carbon, they note that this is limited to the forests they can control from the surface. The stumps are also buried in the delta’s soil, hidden under water, or obscured by vegetation, so the researchers admit that their estimate is likely underestimated. And they say that the whole brine can contain twice as much carbon.
That’s a lot, although it’s still dwarfed by the Mackenzie River Delta itself, whose already carbon-rich soils make it a carbon storage hotspot. According to previous studies, about 34 billion metric tons of carbon could be stored in the delta.
Under natural conditions, the Arctic can support logs and sequester carbon for a long time. About 40% of the records the researchers took on started growing in 1955 or later, but many were older, some dating back to 690 AD.
The researchers note that there are at least a dozen river deltas in the Arctic, covering more than 500 square kilometers, which could represent a network of carbon storage bottlenecks that would be worth studying and protecting.
The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Source: Science Alert
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