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
“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…”
Wait a sec. So if we carelessly erode the fertile topsoil in the region, there’s more “topsoil” below it?
This is indeed good new–wait, it’s BAD news?
Rich sources of carbon deeply buried… who knew?
Tell that to a coal miner, the laughter might temporarily make him forget about the unemployment line Obama wants to put him in.
[Snip. “beckleybud” sockpuppet. Banned. ~mod.]
Yes I know, its like reading “science for dolts”. OTOH, if I (and readers like you) don’t point out how absurd some of these things are, who will?
I published this one because it actually showed that large wildfires are not uncommon. In the age of fire suppression, we’ve built a cocoon of inexperience. – Anthony
***[Send] this thread to the Pentagon crowd! much, much, much more at the link:
26 May: Washington Times: Rowan Scarborough: Retired officers poised to profit after Pentagon’s alarmist climate change report
Urgent Obama call can funnel funds to projects
Retired military officers deeply involved in the climate change movement — and some in companies positioned to profit from it — spearheaded an alarmist global warming report this month that calls on the Defense Department to ramp up spending on what it calls a man-made problem…
The greatest influence on CNA reports seems to come from the Center for Climate and Security, whose position is that the debate on climate change, or man-made global warming, is over…
The Center for Climate and Security has taken donations from the Tides Foundation, which gets money from Democratic Party financier and liberal billionaire George Soros…
The CNA report was celebrated by other global warming foreboders, particularly The New York Times, which gave it home page prominence on its website…
***The CNA report is 100 percent climate change advocacy, stating as fact that global warming has caused flooding and wildfires. It uses phrases such as “more intense storms” and “more frequent and severe storms.”
“Globally, we have seen recent prolonged drought act as a displacement of populations, each contributing to instability and eventual conflict,” the CNA said.
Yet a number of scientists — and the United Nations — have looked at the history of storms and concluded that they cannot be blamed on climate change.
Roger Pielke, an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado who has studied decades of U.S. storm data, told a Senate committee last year: “It is misleading and just plain incorrect to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate time scales either in the United States or globally. It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.”…
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/26/sponsors-of-pentagons-alarm-raising-climate-study-/
meant to begin: ***SEND this thread to the Pentagon crowd.
Is it just me currently getting an “advert” for Smokey the Bear: “Get your Smokey on. Only you can prevent forest fires.”
?
So is congress going to pass another brady bill to deal with brady soil?
The Carboniferous period is when most of our coal was formed (lots of other periods formed coal as well but some the thickest best coal deposits are from this period in Europe and North America).
Europe and North America were at the equator during this period and the other continents were in Gondwana over the south pole. The south pole and Gondwana, was repeatedly glaciated over, the glaciers pushed the land down, the ocean flowed in and the glaciers melted back repeatedly. This lead to sea level rising and falling rapidly, continuously for over 50 million years.
Combined with higher CO2 levels and Europe and North America at the equator, lush tropical fern forests grew here very rapidly and did not decompose as fast as today because the organisms had not evolved yet to break-down cellulose and other plant material.
Combined with variable sea level and less decomposition, the Oxygen content of the atmosphere was as much as 35% compared to today’s 20%. If a forest fire started, it would not stop until there was days and days of rain. A forest fire could literally travel right across the continent. The forests burn down all the way to the ground every few years.
So, now the picture comes together. High CO2, rapidly growing lush forests, less decomposition, massive unstoppable fires, repeated changes in sea level burying the organic remains to turn into … Big coal in Europe and North America.
———
Now go back to the end of the last ice age. North America was either grassland or glacier or tundra. (only the US southeast was forested … everywhere else was tundra, Grassland or glacier, partly due to the lower CO2 level).
Grassland has two relevant features. It buries Carbon much better than a forest does. The black soils of the prairie are evidence of this. And wild Grassland burns every few years as a prairie fire is almost unstoppable in the higher winds. Hence, Carbon sequestration of Grass is many times higher than is generally recognized.
Each acre of Grass or Pasture sequesters 0.3 tons of Carbon each year. Now multiply that by how acres there are on the planet and throw in some pre-industrial prairie fires every few years, and throw in Grassland covering most of North America at the end of the last ice age and what do you have. Black soils and carbon sequestration.
Carbon is estimated to be the fourth most abundant element in the universe. What should be explained by the authors is exactly how “…biological processes that would ordinarily break down carbon in the soil” work. Show how biological processes breaking down carbon would be an astounding scientific breakdown since it reverses the usual method stars used which create carbon a result of nuclear fusion among three helium atoms. It must be one of the amoebae chewing up the carbon to produce the world’s helium which then contributes to the oscillating universal big bang..
One simply stands in awe of green science.
“It looks like there was an incredible amount of fire.”
Some of it is still burning.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/52869/5-places-are-still-fire
So CCS works. Now a viable way to sequester the C from the O2.
RACookPE1978 says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:57 pm
Don’t know about that, though I think that was about the last time the Cubs won the World Series.
Marcos, The Koch brothers are planning to burn that sequestered carbon in order to add to the earth’s stockpile of carbon dioxide.
@Katherine at 6:08 pm
Good catch on the inconsistency:
A) “There is a lot of carbon at depths where nobody is measuring,”
(Erika Marin-Spiotta, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of geography and the lead author of the new study. )
B) 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
I suggest that these professors of geography get out a little more. Wander around campus. Stumble into the Department of Geoscience Ask any one there if the concept of paleosoils, total organic carbon content, and soil coring is something that has occurred to them.
Maybe you will run into Shaw Marcott (of Marcott 2013) who not only looks at paleo soils, but has no compunction against redating the work of other people to make his own poorly supported hockey stick.
“carbon which could, through erosion, agriculture, deforestation, mining and other human activities, contribute to global climate change.”
OMG, it’s worse that we thought !!
Back where I grew up, the loess soils were around 80+ feet thick, forming bluffs along the Mississippi river. Back in my bulldozer days, I learned that graded into any kind of slope, loess would wash away with the first rain, but I’ve seen vertical cuts that I made four decades ago hanging together just fine.
The winds that blew all that loess must have been extremely strong and lasted a couple lifetimes, it not centuries.
“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.”
Now it happens that elemental carbon (=charcoal/soot/fusain) is one of the most stable elements known to science. It is essentially indestructible and will last unchanged for hundreds of millions of year (that is why there is so much coal to be mined). It can only be turned into CO2 by high temperature combustion. So unless “disturbance” includes roasting the disturbed soil that coal isn’t being “reintroduced” anywhere.
Peat (which does not occur in “arid and semiarid areas”) is very different, unless waterlogged it will relatively quickly break down to carbon dioxide and water by bacterial action. These jokers are trying to muddle things up by first talking about (elemental) coal left by wildfires and then switching to “fossil organic carbon”. You have to watch the pea carefully in “climate science”.
Well, there was a hundred times more airborne dust when it was cold. As soon as it started warming, dust cleared up.
So much so, that “dust age” seems to be a better term than “ice age”. Just imagine the incredible dust bowl events needed to form hundreds of feet thick loess deposits all over the Northern hemisphere. Must have been truly catastrophic, nothing even remotely comparable occurs under the current mild climate regime.
“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.”
Can’t help but feel a twinge of skeptiscm. The wildfires that I have seen (granted, different plant profile), and I have seen a few, seemed to burn more completely, leaving a moonscape of white ash with just the occasional incompletely burnt stump of charcoal. Certainly not layers of black carbon. The more ‘incredible’ the fire, the more complete the combustion and the less black remains. After all, charcoal/carbon is a good fuel once it gets going… why would it stop burning with so much around? (My Weber also leaves white ash, having started with charcoal) Something is not right here… probably my own stupidity…
The work suggests that there is still a lot we don’t understand about the land, sea, and air of this planet – so much so that making long-range forecasts is still a fool’s errand. It is certain that the multi-component system is so complex that no single component can be a consistent driver of the system.
You dig in the ground.
Different carbons are found diamond being one.
Charcoal and coal burn well.
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1265&context=geosciencefacpub
From 2008. Nice map of distribution and all sorts of goodies.
So a very long process, not a momentary event. Starts with warming and wettening causing more growth, ends with renewed wind blown loess covering it all as things dried out again. Looks to me more like a smoldering damp grass fire than a raging inferno (that, as pointed out above, tends to leave white ash not black carbon)
Now I’d just like someone to explain how CO2 caused the warming, wettening, drying, cooling etc. etc. etc. of all those changes prior to burning oil…
This “study” is so wrong on so many levels. Over-the-top stupid. We are truly living in a new Dark Age, and Common Reason no longer exists.
RACook and others refer to the work of Firestone et al on plausible relationships between the Younger Dryas, megafauna extinction, and the strike of a comet that broke up in the atmosphere. There are other somewhat wild hypotheses that involve mammoths that were buried and preserved standing up nearly instantaneously, but I dare not delve too far into that literature. If the deposit described here is massive rather than laminated, then this would objectively be supportive of Firestone, but if it represents mulitiple fires over a long interval then not so much. But I’m not going past the paywall to find out.
Oh noes! Now carbon is hiding in the deep soil, waiting to burst out.