The next time somebody says wildfires in the USA are “unprecedented” show them this. Buried fossil soils found to be awash in carbon
“It looks like there was an incredible amount of fire.”
Soils that formed on the Earth’s surface thousands of years ago and that are now deeply buried features of vanished landscapes have been found to be rich in carbon, adding a new dimension to our planet’s carbon cycle.
The finding, reported today (May 25, 2014) in the journal Nature Geoscience, is significant as it suggests that deep soils can contain long-buried stocks of organic carbon which could, through erosion, agriculture, deforestation, mining and other human activities, contribute to global climate change.
“There is a lot of carbon at depths where nobody is measuring,” says Erika Marin-Spiotta, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of geography and the lead author of the new study. “It was assumed that there was little carbon in deeper soils. Most studies are done in only the top 30 centimeters. Our study is showing that we are potentially grossly underestimating carbon in soils.”
The soil studied by Marin-Spiotta and her colleagues, known as the Brady soil, formed between 15,000 and 13,500 years ago in what is now Nebraska, Kansas and other parts of the Great Plains. It lies up to six-and-a-half meters below the present-day surface and was buried by a vast accumulation of windborne dust known as loess beginning about 10,000 years ago, when the glaciers that covered much of North America began to retreat.
The region where the Brady soil formed was not glaciated, but underwent radical change as the Northern Hemisphere’s retreating glaciers sparked an abrupt shift in climate, including changes in vegetation and a regime of wildfire that contributed to carbon sequestration as the soil was rapidly buried by accumulating loess.
“Most of the carbon (in the Brady soil) was fire derived or black carbon,” notes Marin-Spiotta, whose team employed an array of new analytical methods, including spectroscopic and isotopic analyses, to parse the soil and its chemistry. “It looks like there was an incredible amount of fire.”
The team led by Marin-Spiotta also found organic matter from ancient plants that, thanks to the thick blanket of loess, had not fully decomposed.
Rapid burial helped isolate the soil from biological processes that would ordinarily break down carbon in the soil.
Such buried soils, according to UW-Madison geography Professor and study co-author Joseph Mason, are not unique to the Great Plains and occur worldwide.
The work suggests that fossil organic carbon in buried soils is widespread and, as humans increasingly disturb landscapes through a variety of activities, a potential contributor to climate change as carbon that had been locked away for thousands of years in arid and semiarid environments is reintroduced to the environment.
The element carbon comes in many forms and cycles through the environment — land, sea and atmosphere — just as water in various forms cycles through the ground, oceans and the air. Scientists have long known about the carbon storage capacity of soils, the potential for carbon sequestration, and that carbon in soil can be released to the atmosphere through microbial decomposition.
The finding is significant as it suggests that deep soils can contain long-buried stocks of organic carbon, which could contribute to global climate change.
The deeply buried soil studied by Marin-Spiotta, Mason and their colleagues, a one-meter-thick ribbon of dark soil far below the modern surface, is a time capsule of a past environment, the researchers explain. It provides a snapshot of an environment undergoing significant change due to a shifting climate. The retreat of the glaciers signaled a warming world, and likely contributed to a changing environment by setting the stage for an increased regime of wildfire.
“The world was getting warmer during the time the Brady soil formed,” says Mason. “Warm-season prairie grasses were increasing and their expansion on the landscape was almost certainly related to rising temperatures.”
The retreat of the glaciers also set in motion an era when loess began to cover large swaths of the ancient landscape. Essentially dust, loess deposits can be thick — more than 50 meters deep in parts of the Midwestern United States and areas of China. It blankets large areas, covering hundreds of square kilometers in meters of sediment.
The study conducted by Marin-Spiotta, Mason, former UW-Madison Nelson Institute graduate student Nina Chaopricha, and their colleagues was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
by Terry Devitt University of Wisconsin News Service
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This scientific research is the stuff that is expected of all Universes. And of course there is a cost associated with keeping these institutions open for business. However, the ridiculously excessive funding of CAGW scare mongers has to be stopped before it destroys the very society it is designed to improve.
I assume that there must be similar evidence in Europe where the trees were cleared for agriculture?
typo line 1 should be Universities
[Are sure? Universes is actually more correct. 8<) .mod]
Northern Hemisphere’s retreating glaciers sparked an abrupt shift in climate….
head wall……….
“deep soils can contain long-buried stocks of organic carbon, which could contribute to global climate change.”
Everything has to be alarming.
Latitude says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:09 pm
Darn nice of the glaciers to leave and give us a warm-up.
Surely we have known about “deep buried fossil organic carbon” for years!
What do they think coal is?
So if the Brady soil formed 13,500 to 15,000 years ago and this sequestered a significnt amount of carbon, what were the atmospheric CO2 concentrations before and after this period? If there was no significant drop in CO2 then the carbon sequestered is insignificant and this study is just for additional CAGW hype.
@ur momisugly JFisk May 27, 2014 at 3:08 pm
“I assume that there must be similar evidence in Europe where the trees were cleared for agriculture?”
Yep. And not necessarily just large scale activities. I was present on a construction site in Wales that needed to be investigated as it was located over the site of a rampart of a Roman fort. No artefacts emerged but there was a darker layer where the trees and brush had been burned.
Funny thing this:
Isn’t that 13,500 years ago just about the time that all of the major large animals and several stone age civilizations across North America all … disappeared” at just about the same time that there was (or was not) a probable comet/meteorite strike across wide areas of North America?
Could or couldn’t, that’s the question! Could or will, might or should, may or doesn’t, who knows! Settled science, yet no answers, only questions and suggestions. Meanwhile nothing happens, maybe it’s time to move on to some real problems, like hunger, malaria, childlabour, poverty.
But who am I kidding, this whole scam is about fear and control. Let’s burn the food, let’s ruin the economies, let’s make everybodies life as miserable as possible, while people believe it’s for their own good. What a world.
RACookPE1978 says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:57 pm
The Younger Dryas stadial occurred between ~12,800 & 11,500 years BP, but it’s unclear if the 13,500 to 15,000 BP date above is calendar or 14C.
The retreat of the glaciers signaled a warming world, and likely contributed to a changing environment by setting the stage for an increased regime of wildfire.
“The world was getting warmer during the time the Brady soil formed,” says Mason. “Warm-season prairie grasses were increasing and their expansion on the landscape was almost certainly related to rising temperatures.”
I think the cause and effect were the other way around. Increasing fires (particularly peat fires which can burn for years) deposited black carbon on the glaciers, reducing albedo and triggering net melt. Falling sea levels from ice accumulation dried out coastal swamps sufficiently that fires could take hold.
This was a colder time than now. It’s still worse than we thought.
Boreal forest fires are getting worse as the climate warms. We must act now – and before, and again. When will the madness stop?
Abstract – 2008
Climate and wildfires in the North American boreal forest
…Climate controls the area burned through changing the dynamics of large-scale teleconnection patterns (Pacific Decadal Oscillation/El Niño Southern Oscillation and Arctic Oscillation, PDO/ENSO and AO) that control the frequency of blocking highs over the continent at different time scales…
……Since the end of the Little Ice Age, the climate has been unusually moist and variable: large fire years have occurred in unusual years, fire frequency has decreased and fire–climate relationships have occurred at interannual to decadal time scales……
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/363/1501/2315.short
———————————
Paper – 2008
K.E Ruckstuhl et al
Introduction. The boreal forest and global change
……In this issue, Macias & Johnson (2008) show that the frequency of these blocking highs in the North American boreal forest is controlled by the dynamics of large-scale teleconnection patterns (the Pacific Decadal Oscillation/El Niño-Southern Oscillation and the Arctic Oscillation). They also note that warming itself is not a predictor of increased fires since, as shown in previous studies, fire frequency across the North American boreal forest decreased as the Little Ice Age came to an end in the late nineteenth century (Johnson 1992; Bergeron & Archambault 1993). The study by Macias & Johnson (2008) provides not only evidence for the link between decadal-scale changes in the teleconnection patterns (e.g. the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) index) and the increased fire frequency in the late twentieth century but also an explanation of why the pattern of fire variability and fire-climate relationships changes at different time scales from centennial/decadal to interannual…..
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/363/1501/2243.short
———————————
Abstract – 1998
M.D. Flannigan et. al.
Future wildfire in circumboreal forests in relation to global warming
Despite increasing temperatures since the end of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1850), wildfire frequency has decreased as shown in many field studies from North America and Europe. We believe that global warming since 1850 may have triggered decreases in fire frequency in some regions and future warming may even lead to further decreases in fire frequency….
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2307/3237261/abstract
doi:10.2307/3237261
———————————
Abstract– September 1993
Yves Bergeron et. al. – The Holocene
Decreasing frequency of forest fires in the southern boreal zone of Québec and its relation to global warming since the end of the ‘Little Ice Age‘
We present here evidence from fire and tree-ring chronologies that the post-‘Little Ice Age’ climate change has profoundly decreased the frequency of fires in the northwestern Québec boreal forest.
doi: 10.1177/095968369300300307
———————————
Abstract – February 2000
Henri D. Grissino Mayer et. al. – The Holocene –
….Century scale climate forcing of fire regimes in the American Southwest
Following a centuries-long dry period with high fire frequency (c. AD 1400-1790), annual precipitation increased, fire frequency decreased, and the season of fire shifted from predominantly midsummer to late spring….
http://hol.sagepub.com/content/10/2/213.short
THAT WORLD was also COLDER THAN NOW. What is your point?
Can someone please remind these researchers that Carbon /= CO2?
The alarmist BS never ends. Speculation, massive funding, paid for results, pre-conceived outcomes, pal review, ignoble prizes, tropical climate tackling holidays, hypocrisy, high energy bills etc. and all to try and control the Earth’s thermometer. IT WILL FAIL. Check out the smart guys in China, India et al. They are laughing intensely, every day at this garbage.
Hmm. Long buried stocks of organic carbon… It’s almost like higher carbon concentrations were much greater in the past, or something.
Anyone interested in a remarkable theory that explains findings like this can read some Velikovksy.
I just found out that it really is much, much worse than we thought. We must act to tackle “Total Wildland Fires and Acres” DECREASING since 1960. We must act. The climate is going crazy.
US fire data
Oh no! Fossil organic carbon could be a potential contributor to climate change “as humans increasingly disturb landscapes through a variety of activities…”
—
In other words humans, you must stop all activities that might disturb landscapes – no farming, no mining, no drilling, no new housing developments, and certainly no underground atomic bomb testing. I assume they will want us all to crowd into existing urban areas and leave all other landscapes untouched. But if the countryside is not being farmed, how will the urban areas get food, by eating their dead? Perhaps, that’s also part of the plan. If most of us starve to death, all the better because there will be less stress on mother Gaia.
Good point. I do recall that earlier this month the idea was challenged. I don’t know what triggered the Younger Dryas, lots of ideas though.
Sorry for the crap references but they do refer to a study.
So changing climate was a feature of 13 millennia ago. Let’s see, what is the real take home here? Ah yes, wildfires sequester carbon for thousands of years and we get double the bang for the buck because new greenery has to grow using up more carbon. Let ‘er burn baby burn and then grow baby grow. Gee we got to get those Nebraska farmers to stop planting grain down 50 meters. It could disturb the sequestered carbon.
“There is a lot of carbon at depths where nobody is measuring,” says Erika Marin-Spiotta, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of geography and the lead author of the new study. “It was assumed that there was little carbon in deeper soils. Most studies are done in only the top 30 centimeters. Our study is showing that we are potentially grossly underestimating carbon in soils.”
[…]
Such buried soils, according to UW-Madison geography Professor and study co-author Joseph Mason, are not unique to the Great Plains and occur worldwide.
Right. It’s supposedly one of the few studies that go deeper than the top 30 cm, but they go on to claim their results represent the whole world. Color me unimpressed.
Gary Pearse says @ur momisugly 6:01 PM…..Gee we got to get those Nebraska farmers to stop planting grain down 50 meters. It could disturb the sequestered carbon.
Geezzz H Judas,Gary. Don’t give the EPA any ideas! As if any of us here in Canada/USA need more regs.