![]() ![]() East Meadow, NY - MSN Weather Weather in Photos Photos show the devastating Colorado wildfires that scorched up to 1,000 homes and displaced more than 35,000 residents Business Insider Year in.Schiller Park, IL (60176) 69 ☏ Fair Boston, MA warning78 ☏ Fair Houston, TX 83 ☏ Partly Cloudy St James's, England, United Kingdom 60 ☏ Sunny warning Active Advisory: Heat Advisory ( See More).Biden tightens methane emission rules, U.S.The caption and story have been updated.Įditor’s note: The story has been updated to reflect a more accurate mileage of ditches dug to drain peatlands in northern Minnesota. ![]() 11, 2022): An earlier version of this story misidentified a person in the primary photo and story. “And hopefully, places that have a lot of peatlands will start thinking about ‘how do we conserve peatlands? Or restore ones that have already been degraded, to regain that carbon sink?’”Ĭorrections (Oct. “At a minimum has made hopefully the planet more aware how important these ecosystems are for our future climate,” said Kolka. ![]() They say that will give a more accurate picture of what's going to happen to our future climate. Peatlands aren't integrated into those models yet, because they’re not well understood. Kolka and Sebestyen say the information they're gathering is starting to be incorporated into global climate change models. Hundreds of scientists, students and technicians from around the world will continue to work on the experiment through 2025 when it's scheduled to end. And then really focusing efforts on those locations.” The goal is to help figure out where it makes the most sense to re-wet drained wetlands, “to most effectively suck up carbon dioxide without emitting methane. “And so I think there's a lot of work to be done on that side of the story,” he said.īut “we are desperate to find natural climate solutions,” Tucker added. Tucker said the results of their work so far show a complicated picture, where methane emissions are higher than he expected in some areas, but lower in places where they expected higher releases of methane. But if the moss is also restored on top of the peatland, it acts almost like a big air filter, slowing down the release of methane gas. Other research has found that if restored wetlands are simply filled with lots of water, they often release high amounts of methane, Lenhart said. So in the Sax-Zim Bog, researchers are measuring how much carbon dioxide and methane the peat is breathing in, or breathing out, at ten different sites across the bog-some close to the drainage ditch, some far away. That's equivalent to the CO2 released by about 3 million cars in one year. Forest Service analysis estimated that in northern Minnesota alone, the peat destroyed by that ditching released 3.8 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Globally, about 15 percent of the world’s peatlands have been drained, according to the United Nations.Ī recent U.S. So they dug an estimated 2,500 miles of ditches in northern Minnesota to drain them. They saw them as big, mucky areas standing in the way of what they recognized as progress - fertile farms and productive forests. “This is a big concern.” Drained PeatlandsĪ century ago, settlers in northern Minnesota didn't care that peat bogs are some of nature's most powerful carbon sinks. Meanwhile, another nearby experiment is peering into a frightening climate future, and asking what happens to these peatlands as the world warms.Ĭould they turn from carbon sinks into a powerful carbon emitter, into “a runaway source of carbon emissions into the atmosphere?” asked Kristen Blann, a freshwater ecologist with the Nature Conservancy. To that end, Tucker and other scientists in northern Minnesota are working to figure out how best to restore drained peatlands to maximize the amount of carbon they can sequester. Courtesy of Derek Montgomery | The Nature ConservancyĪnd while there has been a lot of focus on planting trees to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, “less is known about how we can manage global peatlands to enhance carbon storage, or at least to reduce carbon loss from peatlands,” he said. ![]()
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