Forests are great and all, but in one way, they don’t come close to the raw power of peatlands. Sprawling in the Arctic and elsewhere, like tropical regions, these soils are loaded with plant matter that’s resisting decay, turning into ultra-concentrated carbon. Though they comprise just 3 percent of Earth’s area, peatlands store 600 billion metric tons of the stuff — more than all the planet’s forests combined — making them critical tools for preventing even more global warming.
On the face of it, then, we might welcome the findings of a new study that shows these carbon sinks are indeed expanding in the Arctic, as scientists have suspected. The region is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, encouraging the growth of plants, just as precipitation up there is also increasing, creating waterlogged conditions that slow decomposition. But the carbon stored in all that new vegetation could still one day return to the atmosphere as a sort of carbon burp, and the degradation of peatlands threatens to release loads of planet-warming gas sooner than that.
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