Scientists have mapped the biggest cumulative logjam, covering about 20 square miles of a delta high in the Canadian Arctic. And, it turns out, it stores A LOT of #carbon.
news.agu.org/press-release/… 1/10

Rivers and deltas throughout the #Arctic collect driftwood for hundreds of years. Because it’s so cold, centuries-old trunks are often preserved in pristine condition, indiscernible from a tree that fell a decade ago. news.agu.org/press-release/… 2/10

All those trees are storing carbon, just like their living relatives. And although scientists know these large, woody deposits are all over the Arctic, they don’t know much about how big they actually are. 3/10

To find out, scientists spent three weeks traipsing around the Mackenzie River Delta, counting, measuring and sampling these driftwood logjams. 4/10

Back in the lab, they carbon-dated the wood and used a neural network to help identify and map the delta’s driftwood deposits from remote imagery and estimate the driftwood’s volume. 5/10

They found 3.4 million tons of carbon are in the logjams — about two and a half million car emissions for a year. 6/10

And that’s just for driftwood visible in satellite imagery. Including buried and hidden driftwood, the real carbon storage could be twice as high, the authors said. 7/10

There are at least a dozen deltas with big logjams like the one the scientists here mapped, making up a massive, yet unmeasured, carbon pool in the fragile Arctic. 8/10

But climate change is threatening even already-dead trees. As the Arctic gets warmer and wetter, driftwood will break down more quickly, releasing some of its carbon into the atmosphere. 9/10

Read the open-access #AGUpubs paper here: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/20… 10/10