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Secret climate weaponry

The muddy, coastal forests known as mangroves are turbo carbon-storage vaults, and recent research indicates that they also house black carbon — a remnant of fires that typically breaks down at a snail’s pace.

The carbon in the mangrove soils of the Zhangjiang Estuary in China was found to be made up of 17 percent burned carbon.

The deeper the soil, the more of this long-lasting carbon remains, showing its ability to hang round for a very long time.

A small portion is mobile, however, traveling out to sea which indicates that while mangroves store carbon, they also release it.

The plants are the key to all of this action as they help to trap more carbon that the soil conditions like texture and nitrogen contribute to its stability.

Ultimately, the research, published in Environmental and Biogeochemical Processes, indicates that mangroves may play a more vital role in climate protection than originally thought — vaulting carbon in the long term and its masked role in global carbon cycling.

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Tiny miners clean up our soil

A Chinese research team recently proposed the novel idea that the ground beneath our feet could clean itself.

A process called microbial iron mining utilizes microbes that can “breathe” iron. As they do, they switch iron back and forth between its rusty and shiny forms — like a little chemical frolic that captures and modifies pollutants.

The tiny miners can tackle toxic metals like arsenic and lead, chemicals like pesticides and microplastics and excess antibiotics and nutrients that typically pollute waterways.

Most notable is that the soil cleaning is natural. Rather than having to dig up and haul away contaminated soil, scientists can provoke these microbes to do the work while saving energy, protecting ecosystems and recovering valuable resources like rare earth elements.

It’s still early days and the research is still lab based, but it shows promise. The next steps are deciphering how this will work in real-world soil while managing side effects like greenhouse-gas releases.

The research demonstrates how powerful nature can be under the right conditions and was published in Environmental and Biogeochemical Processes.

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