The 51-square kilometer (20-square-mile) pileup is an important yet poorly quantified part of the carbon cycle, scientists say. Throughout the Arctic, fallen trees make their way from forests to the ocean by way of rivers. Those logs can stack up as the river twists and turns, resulting in long-t
Scientists have mapped the world’s biggest cumulative logjam that we know of, as reported in a new study in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters. The woody debris stores more than 3 million tons of carbon. Credit: Alicia Sendrowski
“To put that in perspective, that’s about two and a half million car emissions for a year,” said Alicia Sendrowski, a research engineer who led the study while at Colorado State University. “That’s a sizeable amount of carbon,” she said, but it’s not a carbon pool we know much about. “We have great knowledge about carbon in other forms, like dissolved or particulate organic carbon, but not what we call ‘large carbon’ — large wood.” That’s starting to change.
To get a snapshot of the logjams, Sendrowski and her colleagues focused on the Mackenzie River, which has exceptionally high-resolution imagery available and is known to have large wood deposits. Its delta is the third largest in the world by land area and drains about 20% of Canada. The team studied about 13,000 square kilometers of delta in the biggest attempt to map woody deposits so far.
The Mackenzie River Delta is a “hotspot” of carbon storage thanks to incredibly carbon-rich soils, Sendrowski said, so the logs’ carbon storage makes up a relatively small fraction of the delta’s total carbon storage, which is3 quadrillion grams of carbon. “But we think it’s still important because as changes in the basin occur, like logging or damming, and as climate change alters precipitation patterns and warming, wood preservation will decrease.
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