Burying wood in ‘vaults’ could help fight global warming

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By Saima Sidik, Science. 

Excerpt: The discovery of an eastern red cedar log, buried in eastern Canada for millennia and nearly perfectly preserved, illustrates the potential of a new kind of carbon storage scheme in the fight against climate change: wood “vaults.” The log shows how burying wood—rather than letting it decay on the surface—could keep billions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere, advocates say. The unusual conditions that preserved the log, described today in a paper in Science ...they discovered a 78-centimeter-long piece of eastern red cedar. Using carbon-14 dating, they found it was 3775 years old; other lab tests revealed the log had retained some 95% of its carbon. The log was buried in an impermeable, water-logged layer of clay deposited by a sea that has since retreated. The clay, the researchers believe, prevented the delivery of any fresh, oxygen-rich water to the log and kept it from decomposing.... 

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