Evizda

New results from a long-term study point towards a potentially unstoppable feedback loop as earth’s rising temperatures drive soils to release more carbon emissions.

As Bloomberg put it, “There’s a carbon bomb right under your feet.”

Researchers behind the 26-year, ongoing experiment buried cables in a set of plots in a Massachusetts forest and warmed the soil to 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) above the ambient temperature to see how their carbon emissions varied with those of control plots. The researchers found four phases of alternating soil carbon loss and carbon stability. Newsweek explains that “the team believes that during the peak periods, microbes [in the soil] are using up a plentiful supply of food. But when that runs out, the community has to find a new source of food, leading to the lulls in carbon release.”

Over the course of the whole experiment, they found the warmed plots had lost 17 percent of the carbon that had been stored in organic matter in the top 60 centimeters (24 inches) of soil.

“To put this in context,” stated lead author Jerry Melillo, distinguished scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., “each year, mostly from fossil fuel burning, we are releasing about 10 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. That’s what’s causing the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and global warming.”