WOODS HOLE – After 26 years, the world’s longest-running experiment to discover how warming temperatures affect forest soils has revealed a surprising result: Soil warming stimulates periods of abundant carbon release from the soil to the atmosphere alternating with periods of no detectable loss in soil carbon stores.
The study has led by researcher from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Chicago and suggests that in a warming world, a self-reinforcing and perhaps uncontrollable carbon feedback will occur between forest soils and the climate system, adding to the build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The experiment began in 1991 in a deciduous forest stand at the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts. Researchers buried electrical cables in a set of plots and heated the soil 5° C above what it had been.
Over the course of the 26-year experiment (which still continues), the warmed plots lost 17 percent of the carbon that had been stored in organic matter in the top 60 centimeters of soil.
About CapeCod.com NewsCenter
