World’s Largest Tropical Peatlands Revealed to Be More than 40,000 Years Old

A peatland complex in the Congo Basin which is known to be a globally important carbon store is twice as old as previously thought, according to a new scientific study.

An international team of researchers has shown that the tropical peatland complex, which is the world’s largest, began forming about 42,000 years ago, more than 20,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Dr Greta Dargie of the University of Leeds, School of Geography, led the study. She said “These peat swamp forests are a globally important carbon store, holding the equivalent of three years of global fossil fuel emissions. We now know that they are among the most ancient tropical peatlands on the planet”.

Peat is a type of soil that forms in wet environments. Made up of dead plant litter, it is an important part of the carbon cycle. While it is well known that the Congo Basin’s forests store a lot of carbon in the biomass of the living plants, the work of Dr Dargie and others over the past decade has shown that Congo Basin peatlands store a similar amount of carbon out of sight below ground. This realisation has revolutionised scientific understandings of the importance of the region for the global carbon cycle. Read More: University of Leeds

Source: ENN