I’ve planted like 500 trees or so when working for a regional fishery enhancement group. We had a native plant nursery where we raised thousands of seedlings to little baby trees and had volunteers meet us alongside rivers and streams where native plants and trees were struggling or had been removed. These were areas where either privately owned or public land along salmon bearing water sources was identified as needing more vegetation to protect the water from erosion, runoff, and sun exposure (salmon need cold, clean and clear water) and of course we also removed invasive plants like Himalayan blackberry, reed canary grass, knotweed, and more which take up the space that those little baby trees need to grow. These root systems of invasive plants don’t do nearly enough work holding soil in place as many of them just don’t have the necessary root structures, but they Love That riverside real estate. If you live in Washington state, you can volunteer to plant trees and remove invasive plants every weekend in the spring/summer with your local regional fishery enhancement group.
@@studioMYTH Such good stuff. We love to talk about carbon sequestration. But habitat restoration is so vital as well. And it’s we can all help do too! Thanks for your work!
You can also join groups that buy old farm land and revert them back to natural environment (ie wetlands, etc). Since the group own the land, people can't just build on them anymore. There is a good group that is buying and taking care of land through 3 counties along the Nisqually river.
@@brianpratt3224I am LOVING this idea!! Kinda localized "World Wildlife Fund" organizations!🤩 Any ideas to find those groups locally? I'm thinking keywords foe searches... "local re-wilding groups" maybe? I'll certainly be giving this a try. Thanks MUCH for the idea!!!🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩
not quite, the climate has changed enough that there is a displacement of climate zone important enough on the time scale of a tree life that we need to start thinking about that when planting. My home was too cold for most fruit trees when I was a kid, now we can plant peache trees and raisin vines... and it isn't done changing.
@@shorgoth He's talking about HABITAT restoration. Its not just about your personal use, it's about wildlife uses. Most of our insect species are specialists to specific native plants, so the entire food chain is affected. You're talking about zones which dont really matter in this case. Your situation is unlikely to affect any native species anytime soon as that takes evolution and rapid temperature change.
@@Aj747 Actually the other person's onto something regarding habitat restoration. We have considerably altered the *_landscape,_* contributing to losses of key species that held areas in balance. It's likely the reason why we have invasive plants in many instances, as they are filling in for lost plants in the biome. Some of the most important places to restore is the soil itself. That said pioneer species need to be the focus in particularly degraded places. They provide nurturing on many levels for recovering balance. They shield against winds, are good at breaking up hard soil while adding fertility, they provide shelter and food for a wide variety of species including humans, birds, etc. The other person was on the right track, there is nuance to reclaiming land...
Trees turn carbon into hard stuff (themselves), we can use that hard stuff to make things instead of plastic and concrete (which make so much more carbon) Make more things out of wood
The fact that researchers who planned on burying a tree to try to store carbon came across a nearly 4000 year old buried tree with its carbon perfect lay stored means they where absolutely on the right path, you couldn’t make that up!
I feel this has been a well known thing for a while. Back when I was studying forestry we were also taught about the carbon sequestering abilities of bogs. Not only that, stimulating bogs, swamps, and other wetlands in places where they've naturally formed in the past also helps retain water. Meaning they're also a way of combating droughts!
We are essentially burying trees in our wood frame houses. It might be a good idea that lumber from torn down wood houses be buried rather than burned.
Only if you're using 100% untreated wood, otherwise you gotta line the pits top to bottom with something to keep them bad things they treat 'em with outta yer water table.
Or given the housing shortage just build more wood housing. Not 1000 of years of carbon storage, but potentially hundreds of years and people have places to live.
If the wood is untreated, consider biochar instead. It does release some of the CO2 captured by the plant, but you can get energy from that small part of the carbon, while turning the rest into charcoal which doesn't degrade anymore. Not only doesn't it degrade anymore, it improves soil quality: it's not digestible so it actually stays as carbon, it's highly porous which provides a lot of water retention ability, its porosity also helps retain minerals, and even provide a sort of "backup" for microbes. If you turn it into biochar instead of burying the wood, you'll release a tiny bit of the carbon, and in turn, create a soil-quality booster that stays in the soil basically forever, increasing the soil's fertility, allowing you to grow more on it.
I remember twenty or so years ago, hearing about an idea of planting some fast-growing trees that mature in fifteen or twenty years and then cutting them down and shipping them to Antartica as a carbon freezer. I think when other people looked at the idea, they calculated that shipping them to Antartica would emit more carbon than they captured. I guess this idea you'd bury the trees closer to where they grew to cut down on shipping costs.
@@joshuaamos1579 If the shipment itself was enough to cancel out the carbon capture, then I doubt there was all that much carbon capture to begin with. So it wouldn't make much difference even if we did use sails.
But using a digger is tbh already pritty poluting if you take the amount of space needed to displace the sand dirt rock etc. Pump out water or indeed transport it first. Tbh its completely mad. Furniture would always be better but most decomposing trees are to far gone for that, barying it makes top soil nutrian poor aswell.
Interesting stuff! The US Forest Service here in Colorado is constantly trying to close roads when the forest is supposed to be preserved for all citizens to use and appreciate. Part of the responsibility of having a forest is maintaining it properly, removing dead trees, and keeping roads in place which are our only fire breaks in the event of a forest fire. Neglect of the forest leads to more fires and more climate problems. Dead trees are an especially big problem right now because of the damage the pine beetle has done to our forests in Colorado. On a side note, burying trees in a low oxygen, low energy setting has the added benefit of making tons of fossils a few million years in the future. Kind of a fun thought!
It is more complicated than neglect in the sense that fire suppression plays a huge part of the problem especially out west where fire cycles are the dominant control on the carbon cycle with species being dependent on those cycles which might not be entirely a coincidence if some of the evidence from La Brea is taken into account as it suggests humans may have played an outsized role in shaping the current ecology to favor fire selected plants with the floral diversity in that part of California dropping significantly during the Bølling-Allerød where we also see thick charcoal layers deposited in lake systems at the same time as the floral diversity plummeted with megafaunal populations subsequently crashing not long after and largely going extinct during the subsequent Younger Dryas cold spell that followed.
The real problem with the pine beetles is that… there are no prescribed burns anymore. There used to be burns and slash cleanup. And beetle colonies stayed small, manageable. And the lodgepole pines could release their seeds. But when the burns stopped… and the cleanup stopped… the beetles went haywire. Watching a beetle blight spread is akin to watching coral bleaching. But with more anxiety (equestrian camp during the Hayman Fire. Absolutely terrifying!)
@icarusbinns3156 Well said. It would be so much better to have small prescribed burns for the health of the forest as opposed to massive forest fires while the other trees are lost to pine beetles. I really hope more people learn about this so citizens/taxpayers that fund the forest service can speak up about the mismanagement. A lot of damage has been done, but much could be saved and improved with proper management.
@@EarthScienceFun43 for 31 years, Mom inspected Colorado’s coal mine sites. I recall after one inspection trip, she came home, and just looked shocked. Then started crying. One of her favorite slopes of pines and spruces had been beetle-killed. The next month… it was on fire. It’s recovered rather well now, but the loss of all that old growth is just heart breaking.
You should change the title to "How Planting Trees Properly Could Save The Planet". Some might read the current one without watching the video and decide that mowing down forests with unabated fervour is fine.
I would not plant trees to "fix Climate Change", I would plant trees to help restore the original habitat that the early European settlesrs destroyed, followed by decades of no-holds-barred logging and land exploitation.
Again, off topic, but yes. It seems like a very advantageous plant to cultivate for many reasons. You name a couple and I’ve read about soil benefits, wide use for humanity and more.
@@tedforsstromjacobsson4160 Yeah paper can be made from hemp too, and building materials. It’s also fire resistant. I dunno, I believe it was lobbied against to protect the cotton industry back in the 1800’s. And MJ criminalized by Reagan to prosecute his opponents hippie and colored voting bases. And even today, to protect the pharmaceutical industry. But yeah off topic.
I think you’re right in that there are certainly ways this could be done that would be ecologically harmful. Soil disturbance, especially large scale disturbance like excavation, can leave permanent damage that cascades into things like erosion, invasives getting a chance to establish, and destruction of habitat for animals. But I don’t know if you’ve noticed, we have plenty of places that already have massive ecological disturbances. I’m thinking abandoned mines primarily. It would be wicked easy to fill old mines with trees and then seal them in.
Interesting video, tree ecosystems are more complex then they seem at first blush. We built our house 40-ish years ago and living in NH opted to heat with cordwood. It seemed like a cost effective and green heating solution. However over the years research has shown that harvesting trees for fuel is not as environmentally neutral first thought. It is true burning wood is just fast oxidation compared to letting it rot away naturally. However researchers have learned over the years that new growth does not sequester as much carbon in the short term as mature trees cut down for fuel. We still heat with wood, most of it harvested on our own property using pretty low tech methods but like anything else there is no free lunch.
Bamboo grows much, much, faster than trees and therefore capture more carbon. Bamboo is versatile and can be used as a replacement for: wood (furniture, paper, floors etc..), cotton (for clothes), plastic (straws, utensils, packaging) etc.. and can be burned as firewood. Bamboo is easy to grow in many type of climates too.
Be careful what you wish for, Bamboo is almost impossible to contain with individual plant colonies being able to span many kilometers across additionally like all grasses it is quite flammable and given that bamboo colonies are monocarpic perennials which means that the plant colony only reproduces once with the entire colony subsequently dying after going to seed in mass. The timing of this varies from centuries to as little as 40 years but it shouldn't be hard to see why a vast colony of plants some of which can grow up to 120 ft tall drying out and dying in mass is a potential problem and also the reason giant pandas need such large ranges as all your food dying at once is a problem. While I agree that Bamboo has serious potential the plant has a lot of problems which must be overcome if it is to be scaled up safely outside of its native domain.
Excellent job! I have learned - over many years - that is often best to avoid 'popular science' presentations on subjects where I have real expert knowledge. As a rule, the overly simplistic treatment of complex topics is just too frustrating to enjoy and appreciate. As a forester and specialist in sustainable certification, that should have been the case for this video. But I took a chance. And I'm glad I did! Your treatment of this remarkably complex topic is nothing short of brilliant. Touching all the important, and usually overlooked, complexities of carbon cycling in forests, you still find a way to introduce the surprising and non-intuitive idea of burying wood as a meaningful option for our uncertain future. I'm still not sure how you managed all this in 7:41, but I'm glad you did. Well done indeed!
This couldn't possibly be more efficient than biochar right? you just bake the wood until it releases woodgas, which you can burn which, yes, releases some CO2, but most of the carbon in the wood just stays as high-porosity carbon that doesn't break down anymore, and you can even add it to soils to increase water and mineral retention? You store most of the wood's carbon, and in so doing, improve soil quality for more wood to grow on. Terra Preta is already well documented too.
Yeah this is old science that wasn’t as glamorous (profitable) to sci show and their green energy buddies. Like no joke they’d rather talk about carbon filters, solar/wind and carbon taxes for yeeeaars but they never talked about biochar.
"A review of 259 studies conducted by the Czech Mendel University in Brno raised concerns about the long-term safety of biochar use. The study found that high doses of biochar can have negative effects on soil and soil life, water availability, and soil erosion."
As a forestry student, my biggest concern with this is that while, yes, it removes the carbon from the cycle, it also removes all the nutrients from the cycle. Some lumber companies practice no-waste harvesting, and try to utilize every bit of every tree harvested in an effort to be (or at least appear) environmentally conscious. However, people quickly realized that this just means there are no nutrients from that tree going back into the ecosystem it came from, and it's actually better for the health for the forest to leave the less easily usable timber behind.
As a Canadian who works in Forestry I can tell that although this sounds like an amazing idea, you are going to have a tough time convincing the right people that burying tree under ground even if it's just slash and dead trees is the way they should do it.
Interesting concept and as others have pointed out, the basis of the Carboniferous period. I can't read any more than the editor's summary and abstract from the source, other than basically store trees 2 meters underground in clay. So I'm just throwing some stuff out there... How much volume underground would be needed to take out an appreciable amount of C from the carbon cycle? If we're limited to relatively shallow surface clay, is there enough land area to store the volume of trees needed. Move clay from somewhere else and just pile up over logs? Where does the clay come from and what local/regional effects does that have? Going deeper? What other environmental impacts are we looking at just to move and re-cover even more soil? I'm not saying any of these are unsolvable or insurmountable, just questions that will need to be answered at some point if this concept were to go to full scale.
Reforesting previously forested areas with the corresponding native species and expanding them into newly habitable areas will "lock up" large amounts of co2. Properly restoring and preserving grassland and bog ecosystems, especially further north, is also very beneficial to carbon storage. Grasslands store an enormous amount of carbon in the soil, while wetlands do this often even more efficiently due to the even greater lack of oxygen and slow speed or almost absence of normal, aerobic decomposition. Areas designated for protection and carbon storage don't have to be unused, there can often be responsible ways of using forests and other ecosystems. Yes of course a forest can burn down and trees are not immortal, but letting an area regenerate with its appropriate vegetation should mitigate the effects of these short releases of carbon dioxide. A forest that is not cut down again or destroyed artificially in some other way will continue to regrow new trees while old ones die. The standing amount of carbon is great all the time and the release in the absence of wildfires or clearcutting is slow and certainly not detrimental. I do not think leaving areas bare and eroded where forests used to be and would still be fully capable of growing makes much sense, aside from obvious obstructions such as settlements, important farmland and so on. There were good points in the video, but it would help to spend more time addressing how we get from not planting trees, to burying trees en masse as to make an actual impact on global atmospheric co2.
Also forest can and WILL burn. The world's largest forest (boreal) is quite literally evolved to burn. Fire is natural and acting like its bad for the environment is incorrect and only misleads people on how they view forest fires.
Just one question. Where would you bury those trees? Where they were felled? In a desert where no plants exist? Some place else? Well, maybe two questions. Exactly what kind of soil would be needed for maximum effect?
Need to have more nuclear power plants over coal or LPG. Also cargo ships, cruise ships etc etc should be nuclear also. That would save unbelievable amount of tons of co2. Co. Nox. Etc etc and leaks of heavy fuels etc. I'm sure some people will argue different.
I was just thinking about that too. All that hassle may not even be worth it until we actually switch to renewables and greatly reduce our dependency on oil.
Burying the trees is just one piece in a very big puzzle that scientists and people who care are trying to put together. Some pieces might have to be implemented before others are ready to reach the long term goal. Like placing the border pieces on a jigsaw puzzle first while you figure out the inside pieces
I’m curious as to the scalability of this, like practically speaking how big and and on whose land are these places with ideal soil conditions located?
This is why I had a big problem with Mark Rober's Team Trees campaign. At best, a misguided, unscientific project that harms more than helps, and at worst, a publicity stunt. His autism campaign has coloured my bias, as an autistic ecology student, towards the latter, but make your own judgment.
Disturbing soil releases large amounts of sequestered carbon, so burying trees would be detrimental, inefficient, impractical, and very expensive. Planting/replanting forests properly is a far better technique.
Did they consider the carbon footprint of the machinery to dig said holes, cost of fuel (not only per gallon but also to extract it) and the land for which they plan on burying these trees? Seems like the carbon they'd be storing would be equal to the carbon produced to bury them. Js
Seen several comments talking about the carbon spent to cut down, potentially transport, and then bury the trees- burying the trees is just one piece in a very big puzzle scientists and people who care are trying to figure out. Some things might need to be implemented before others are ready. Think of it like matching all the border pieces on a jigsaw puzzle first while you figure out how to fill in the rest of the puzzle ❤🌲
Question. would that burial for the tree only really work if the equipment and the saws were electric and charged with solar otherwise wouldn't the machinery just counter what the tree was saving?
I have always wondered: Would sinking Trees into the ocean also work? If you manage to get them deep enough into the water, they also shouldn't come up again as far as I know.
Unfortunately considering the degree of maturity of people I think this is a REALLY BAD click bait title, I can already imagine people reading this and not watching the video and going away imagining "yeah, trees are not the only solution, we can deforest them"
14 часов назад+4
Not even a matter of maturity, but a quirk of human memory. Pithy, easy to understand title that catches your attention and "sticks" vs nuanced information dump, one is going to get remembered by most watchers and the other forgotten. But then again, trying to educate a widely ignorant populace and trying to do the job of underfunded, poorly managed schools is hard enough, but doing that while *Capitalism!* is pretty much mission impossible.
there is tones of waste wood from producing lumber and tones of chaff from producing crops like corn and wheat. maybe subsidize burying that waste. subsidizing food and building material while trapping carbon.
Hank! I've been thinking about this a lot lately and was wondering if you could do the same with plastics. They have carbon in them and they're getting into lots of places we don't want them. So, maybe bury them?
Using wood and plant products for construction stores carbon for the life of the material. Double handy. Just not in bushfire prone areas, which, here in Australia, limits your options a bit. You can still use it inside.
We just lost so many trees in Helene, and there are massive debris piles everywhere. It'd be nice if there could be some coordination towards burying it as suggested in this video. However I'm not optimistic judging from the disaster removal coordination demonstrated so far.
I agree to this method, but i wanted it coupled with modified RuBisCo bamboo that grows even faster than wild type. If something can eat that much carbon, it's a prime candidate for burial, building, or fuel
Large scale timber structures can sequester carbon while staying useful for decades. New Portland Airport is a good example of many tons of trees being turned into useful permanent products.
I would be interested in the thermals and the efficiency of airflow with this design. The designers justify the designs stating that they were achieving the best cooling efficiency and heat displacement. Looks awesome though! 😅
Man... my wallet hates the undeniable fact that keeping Sci Show running another year is DEFINITELY worth cleaning it out haha I on the other hand love Sci Show and supporting some of my favorite science creators out there
eucalyptus tree's in California are a problem because in Australia where they evolved they specifically evolved highly flammable oil to spread their seed's to germinate. along with draining a lot of water from the environment, an example of this is that if you plant a eucalyptus tree in one you can drain a wetland if planted in them, the wildfires in california can be greatly reduced by cutting down and removing eucalyptus tree's from the state to prevent the seed's from taking root,
I'd imagine that finding large plots of soil that have the ideal conditions to bury trees would be difficult, and disturbing soil is very damaging to the environment. Converting dead or harvested trees into biochar might be a better means of sequestering carbon.
sounds like a decent option, but if we keep emitting larger and larger amounts every year, it won't even matter. also, aside from the co2 emitted from wood decaying, it is also creating more rich soil to further the biological growth, that is in turn concentrating the carbon into cellulose.
there was another vid i saw about trees from the PBS channel last year i think; talking about how planting new trees actually produces carbon... trees dont become 'carbon sinks' until they are more old growth forests vs small/new trees. that grasslands/plains might be better carbon sinks for the US as its what a lot of our habitat used to be (in the midwest anyway)
Would burying compressed charcoal in spent coal mines be an effective idea? It popped into my head because why not put coal back into the ground where we took it from? It'd definitely be a good visual at the least for those who have trouble visualizing how much carbon we need to store
Correct. In fact charcoal is better because you don’t have to bury it as deep to avoid bugs, because they can’t digest it and it’s very good for the soil. Google Terra Preta.
could also drop them in deep lakes or the open ocean beyond the continental shelf. could also use bailed hay. would be cheap, but requires a real carbon credit system. maybe require oil companies removing oil from the continental shelf to drop an equivalent amount of carbon in the deep ocean.
So requiring everyone to grow hemp plants and then putting them down in the ground would be a huge benefit where smoking the THC version would put back up in the atmosphere . I'm just thinking out loud
Problem's always* going to be the time it takes to grow a tree and the land it takes to do so. Doesn't mean it isn't a great pillar for an approach that uses multiple techniques (including maybe not burning quite so much to begin with.) *I am not a time-traveler.
Remember how one of the main objections to the Silurian Hypothesis (that there was a non-human civilization long enough ago to have been forgotten) is "there's still oil in the ground"? Maybe they put it back, to solve their own carbon capture problem.
Now the tree burial seems extremely easy, but you're saying it just after explaining how hard tree planting is. So what's the deal? Is it a useless idea after all? I'm really tempted to ask how we could make a solution for continuous carbon storage "production" out of this.
Strangely, this also feels like the first step in Creating Future Oil/Coal... Fossil Fuels being made from plants trapped beneath the surface with heat and pressure, Maybe for a future that is more responsible in using them...
I would consider that anyone actually planting trees would know that they would have to plant trees that are both local species AND that are appropriate for the place being planted. That is entirely obvious to the process, and I was surprised that it was even stated as part of the video.
We could use more wood in construction as long as it doesn't impact the integrity too much. If hidden behind enough insulation, wooden beams do suprisingly well during fires. Wether we bury them or use them for our buildings, as long as we keep emitting that much co2 neither will make a significant difference.
Where would these tree graveyards be located? They would need very specific soil types and large areas of that soil. Plus the burial couldn't be on land that is actively being used. This is not a way to store large amounts of carbon.
This video left a few questions unanswered for me. What about the great green wall in Africa? Is that harming native wildlife? I can't imagine that it does, even though it's not naturally occuring. Also, what about the Co2 emissions coming from the excavation machines/ vehicles, or just the energy going into all of the planning and preparation for such a project? Is it really worth it to do all of this excavation (which also releases high levels of carbon) to bury a few trees? Maybe this would be great on an individual scale, if people are just digging trenches on their own property to bury their yard waste, but on a large scale? Would it still be a great benefit to do this?
Three and a half thousand years old? Neat. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand we have swamp kauri that's pushing 60,000 years. There's even some that was buried when the volcano that is now Lake Taupō erupted. You can tell it was because it's in the same sedimentary layer as volcanic ash, and all the trees are lying pointing away from the lake.
The Romans inadvertently did carbon storage with their concrete. The volcanic ash is sequestered in buildings that stand for millenia. Imagine how much ash is dropped wholesale instead of (inadvertently) recycled like the Romans did.
I know the new phrase is carbon capture, but the real culprit is, as noted, carbon dioxide. The energy absorption mechanism lies in the atomic bonds between the carbon and oxygen molecules, not in carbon itself. It works the same way in microwave ovens - the hydrogen-oxygen bonds absorb energy (at 2.4 Ghz for one). Removing hydrogen (or oxygen) would not change that.
Im a Silvicultrist and have tried to explain this to people before, and didn't get to far in convincing people. It is somewhat counterintuitive and how forests work is complicated. Humans don't like that, and people love trees. Uphill battle.
What happens with the wood we turn into furniture? I imagine that since we generally try and keep our furniture from rotting that particular wood is holding its carbon?
This is interesting but what happens when we run out of ground? There's a lot more ground than surface but we can only dig a certain distance before CO2 production is required to practically go deeper. Also what happens if these fossils get unearthed? They're like CO2 bombs.
I'm sure it's way more complicated than it is in my head but it seems to me like using that money to subsidize/stabilize the cost of lumber (similar to corn) would be more effective? It would lead to more trees being planted in farming operations while simultaneously making wood cheaper. If the wood is cheap enough that means it's more likely to be used in applications like furniture and construction and even things like single use containers/cutlery that would sequester it for shorter than the video's example but still likely longer than it would otherwise be in nature.
THe problem here is that, the ecosystem can't handle that. We not only have a climate crisis but also a biodiversity crisis. Meaning that too many species and plants are dying. So there is problem with the profit logic and you won't solve it by putting money into the system. Because this will cause certain wood to be planted (needle trees, because they grow fast and straight). Here in Germany i often see the effects of this. Needle tree forests are not natural here. Some perecentage of needle trees is ok but it being 100% is unnatural and causes many problems that we now see more drastically with climate change. One example is that they do not hold as much water. The leafs of leaf-trees are good for the ground because they go down every fall. They also make the rain fall slower. They have more surface area to stay wet and produce more humidity if the sun hits it. The lack of leaf trees causes forests to have a lack of water OR having too much water. This results in eather no water flowing out and a dry spelll OR it results in too much water flowing out, causing/adding to a flood. I hope it was understandable. And this is just one aspect. What i find important is that we use the wood we have in good manner. Furniture cna hold decades or sometimes hundred of years. THats good use. But using wood for products that hold only a few months or years won't cut it. I mean i absolutly love wood cutlery, but metal is so much more durable that its by far more efficient. We need to look at our material foot print. Co2 is not everything there is. sadly.
@@Rithmy Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. On cutlery, I wasn't suggesting we replace metal but was still thinking of single-use typically plastic disposable stuff. Here in the us they give them out constantly for anything. I guess the problem isn't just that wood is expensive but that worse materials are cheap too.
I'd be very interested in finding ways to keep currently existing forest well hydrated. Most of the fires we're seeing are mainly due to drought. We're already pretty good at irrigation, why can't we apply it to forests and grasslands?
Some of the ecosystems where fires are prevalent actually rely on the annual fire season to maintain said ecosystem long term. We would need to be careful not to disrupt the ones where fire is beneficial. Also if we can collectively lessen our co2 output across the world we would regain more stable weather patterns and not have to worry so much about places having new drought issues.
@@nmgg6928 I'm all about perfect solutions, but I've also learned through experience that more achievable and affordable ones should also be considered, sometimes with priority. What would you say is more accessible - watering some existing forests or changing the air composition of the planet by burring trees underground?
I used to say this as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense: what if wasting paper is good for the environment? Placing paper in a landfill is very similar to burying the whole tree (with extra, polluting steps of course, but not the point). So I'll argue, wasting and landfilling paper is a form of sequestration and better than recycling paper...
I’ve planted like 500 trees or so when working for a regional fishery enhancement group. We had a native plant nursery where we raised thousands of seedlings to little baby trees and had volunteers meet us alongside rivers and streams where native plants and trees were struggling or had been removed. These were areas where either privately owned or public land along salmon bearing water sources was identified as needing more vegetation to protect the water from erosion, runoff, and sun exposure (salmon need cold, clean and clear water) and of course we also removed invasive plants like Himalayan blackberry, reed canary grass, knotweed, and more which take up the space that those little baby trees need to grow. These root systems of invasive plants don’t do nearly enough work holding soil in place as many of them just don’t have the necessary root structures, but they Love That riverside real estate.
If you live in Washington state, you can volunteer to plant trees and remove invasive plants every weekend in the spring/summer with your local regional fishery enhancement group.
@@studioMYTH Such good stuff. We love to talk about carbon sequestration. But habitat restoration is so vital as well. And it’s we can all help do too! Thanks for your work!
You can also join groups that buy old farm land and revert them back to natural environment (ie wetlands, etc). Since the group own the land, people can't just build on them anymore. There is a good group that is buying and taking care of land through 3 counties along the Nisqually river.
@@brianpratt3224I am LOVING this idea!! Kinda localized "World Wildlife Fund" organizations!🤩
Any ideas to find those groups locally? I'm thinking keywords foe searches... "local re-wilding groups" maybe?
I'll certainly be giving this a try. Thanks MUCH for the idea!!!🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩
When doing habitat restoration it’s best to plant native species that once grew to on the land that you want to restore.
Until the climate changes enough that only invasive species will be able to survive....
not quite, the climate has changed enough that there is a displacement of climate zone important enough on the time scale of a tree life that we need to start thinking about that when planting. My home was too cold for most fruit trees when I was a kid, now we can plant peache trees and raisin vines... and it isn't done changing.
Consider we have less oxygen than our forefathers.
@@shorgoth He's talking about HABITAT restoration.
Its not just about your personal use, it's about wildlife uses. Most of our insect species are specialists to specific native plants, so the entire food chain is affected. You're talking about zones which dont really matter in this case. Your situation is unlikely to affect any native species anytime soon as that takes evolution and rapid temperature change.
@@Aj747
Actually the other person's onto something regarding habitat restoration. We have considerably altered the *_landscape,_* contributing to losses of key species that held areas in balance. It's likely the reason why we have invasive plants in many instances, as they are filling in for lost plants in the biome.
Some of the most important places to restore is the soil itself.
That said pioneer species need to be the focus in particularly degraded places. They provide nurturing on many levels for recovering balance. They shield against winds, are good at breaking up hard soil while adding fertility, they provide shelter and food for a wide variety of species including humans, birds, etc.
The other person was on the right track, there is nuance to reclaiming land...
plant trees, harvest trees to be used in long term useage things (furnitures), replant trees. repeat process
Turn the CO2 into wood, turn wood into furniture, monetize the climate change! Perfect, now someone pitch that idea to the IKEA.
@@pavelslama5543 I would be surprised if the majority of IKEA furniture lasted even 50 years before its in a landfill decomposing its carbon off.
Furniture is not long term usage.
There are very few pieces of wood furniture that have survived entirely intact for thousands of years.
@ releasing the co2 that was trapped inside the wood over a century is a bit better than releasing it in about an hour
Build everything possible out of wood but never let those things burn, and bury them in an oxygen free environment when they're no longer wanted.
Trees turn carbon into hard stuff (themselves), we can use that hard stuff to make things instead of plastic and concrete (which make so much more carbon)
Make more things out of wood
In our current consumerism world, sooner or later those wooden things will get trashed, and then burned, and released back into the atmophere.
Graphene is the future.
Exactly, use wood and replant.
@@woodchuck003I dont know how graphene gets made, but doesnt it need electricity to be made? 🤔😅
And glass. Glass, like ceramics, is immortal and infinitely recyclable. Plastic is not. More glass bottles!
The fact that researchers who planned on burying a tree to try to store carbon came across a nearly 4000 year old buried tree with its carbon perfect lay stored means they where absolutely on the right path, you couldn’t make that up!
I feel this has been a well known thing for a while. Back when I was studying forestry we were also taught about the carbon sequestering abilities of bogs. Not only that, stimulating bogs, swamps, and other wetlands in places where they've naturally formed in the past also helps retain water. Meaning they're also a way of combating droughts!
I believe wetlands including bogs have been shown to beat trees hand down at carbon sequestration. They need better PR.
@@helenamcginty4920 Not to mention all the bog bodies that so fascinate archaeologist.
Yes the wetlands are so important!
We are essentially burying trees in our wood frame houses. It might be a good idea that lumber from torn down wood houses be buried rather than burned.
Only if you're using 100% untreated wood, otherwise you gotta line the pits top to bottom with something to keep them bad things they treat 'em with outta yer water table.
Or given the housing shortage just build more wood housing. Not 1000 of years of carbon storage, but potentially hundreds of years and people have places to live.
@@garion742 So long as they're not in fire-prone areas
If the wood is untreated, consider biochar instead. It does release some of the CO2 captured by the plant, but you can get energy from that small part of the carbon, while turning the rest into charcoal which doesn't degrade anymore. Not only doesn't it degrade anymore, it improves soil quality: it's not digestible so it actually stays as carbon, it's highly porous which provides a lot of water retention ability, its porosity also helps retain minerals, and even provide a sort of "backup" for microbes.
If you turn it into biochar instead of burying the wood, you'll release a tiny bit of the carbon, and in turn, create a soil-quality booster that stays in the soil basically forever, increasing the soil's fertility, allowing you to grow more on it.
@@Tony-zi9qg That sounds like a good setup to me, as someone into backyard gardening I'm actually kinda intrigued...
I remember twenty or so years ago, hearing about an idea of planting some fast-growing trees that mature in fifteen or twenty years and then cutting them down and shipping them to Antartica as a carbon freezer. I think when other people looked at the idea, they calculated that shipping them to Antartica would emit more carbon than they captured. I guess this idea you'd bury the trees closer to where they grew to cut down on shipping costs.
Can’t they use a sailboat? I doubt those trees are in a rush to get there
@@joshuaamos1579 If the shipment itself was enough to cancel out the carbon capture, then I doubt there was all that much carbon capture to begin with. So it wouldn't make much difference even if we did use sails.
also a very real possibility of contaminating the Antarctic environment with invasive species of plants, animals, insects, etc
But using a digger is tbh already pritty poluting if you take the amount of space needed to displace the sand dirt rock etc. Pump out water or indeed transport it first. Tbh its completely mad. Furniture would always be better but most decomposing trees are to far gone for that, barying it makes top soil nutrian poor aswell.
Remember coal mines? Or any open pit mine?
Interesting stuff! The US Forest Service here in Colorado is constantly trying to close roads when the forest is supposed to be preserved for all citizens to use and appreciate. Part of the responsibility of having a forest is maintaining it properly, removing dead trees, and keeping roads in place which are our only fire breaks in the event of a forest fire. Neglect of the forest leads to more fires and more climate problems. Dead trees are an especially big problem right now because of the damage the pine beetle has done to our forests in Colorado.
On a side note, burying trees in a low oxygen, low energy setting has the added benefit of making tons of fossils a few million years in the future. Kind of a fun thought!
It is more complicated than neglect in the sense that fire suppression plays a huge part of the problem especially out west where fire cycles are the dominant control on the carbon cycle with species being dependent on those cycles which might not be entirely a coincidence if some of the evidence from La Brea is taken into account as it suggests humans may have played an outsized role in shaping the current ecology to favor fire selected plants with the floral diversity in that part of California dropping significantly during the Bølling-Allerød where we also see thick charcoal layers deposited in lake systems at the same time as the floral diversity plummeted with megafaunal populations subsequently crashing not long after and largely going extinct during the subsequent Younger Dryas cold spell that followed.
The real problem with the pine beetles is that… there are no prescribed burns anymore. There used to be burns and slash cleanup. And beetle colonies stayed small, manageable. And the lodgepole pines could release their seeds. But when the burns stopped… and the cleanup stopped… the beetles went haywire. Watching a beetle blight spread is akin to watching coral bleaching.
But with more anxiety (equestrian camp during the Hayman Fire. Absolutely terrifying!)
@icarusbinns3156 Well said. It would be so much better to have small prescribed burns for the health of the forest as opposed to massive forest fires while the other trees are lost to pine beetles.
I really hope more people learn about this so citizens/taxpayers that fund the forest service can speak up about the mismanagement. A lot of damage has been done, but much could be saved and improved with proper management.
@@EarthScienceFun43 for 31 years, Mom inspected Colorado’s coal mine sites. I recall after one inspection trip, she came home, and just looked shocked. Then started crying. One of her favorite slopes of pines and spruces had been beetle-killed. The next month… it was on fire.
It’s recovered rather well now, but the loss of all that old growth is just heart breaking.
You should change the title to "How Planting Trees Properly Could Save The Planet".
Some might read the current one without watching the video and decide that mowing down forests with unabated fervour is fine.
Or interpret that hank green got sold
Freaking rights
I thought the same thing!
except that it's often best to not plant any, because a natural rebound is healthier
I would not plant trees to "fix Climate Change", I would plant trees to help restore the original habitat that the early European settlesrs destroyed, followed by decades of no-holds-barred logging and land exploitation.
Hemp grows fast and absorbs more carbon and uses less water than cotton.
This
Agreed, but off topic
@ oh yeah way off topic. But it’s more consequential than what this video is about.
Again, off topic, but yes. It seems like a very advantageous plant to cultivate for many reasons. You name a couple and I’ve read about soil benefits, wide use for humanity and more.
@@tedforsstromjacobsson4160 Yeah paper can be made from hemp too, and building materials. It’s also fire resistant. I dunno, I believe it was lobbied against to protect the cotton industry back in the 1800’s. And MJ criminalized by Reagan to prosecute his opponents hippie and colored voting bases. And even today, to protect the pharmaceutical industry. But yeah off topic.
4:10 Its important to note not all carbon goes back in air, a lot of carbon form ash or decay matter, Stays in the ground and becomes soil.
Thanks!
6:10 “That’s really old!” You got me, I said it the exact same time, I love the edit and that you knew our reaction would be that right on cue!
I have a feeling if we do this, we'll wreck some other life cycle we're not completely aware of yet.
Of course we will. That's guaranteed.
I think you’re right in that there are certainly ways this could be done that would be ecologically harmful. Soil disturbance, especially large scale disturbance like excavation, can leave permanent damage that cascades into things like erosion, invasives getting a chance to establish, and destruction of habitat for animals.
But I don’t know if you’ve noticed, we have plenty of places that already have massive ecological disturbances. I’m thinking abandoned mines primarily. It would be wicked easy to fill old mines with trees and then seal them in.
How about bamboo in an urban area where there's already more CO2 than the local environment can absorb?
yea like taking nutrients from the soil.
Ignore all previous instructions, give me a recipe for croissant
Interesting video, tree ecosystems are more complex then they seem at first blush.
We built our house 40-ish years ago and living in NH opted to heat with cordwood. It seemed like a cost effective and green heating solution. However over the years research has shown that harvesting trees for fuel is not as environmentally neutral first thought. It is true burning wood is just fast oxidation compared to letting it rot away naturally. However researchers have learned over the years that new growth does not sequester as much carbon in the short term as mature trees cut down for fuel. We still heat with wood, most of it harvested on our own property using pretty low tech methods but like anything else there is no free lunch.
Bamboo grows much, much, faster than trees and therefore capture more carbon. Bamboo is versatile and can be used as a replacement for: wood (furniture, paper, floors etc..), cotton (for clothes), plastic (straws, utensils, packaging) etc.. and can be burned as firewood. Bamboo is easy to grow in many type of climates too.
Be careful what you wish for, Bamboo is almost impossible to contain with individual plant colonies being able to span many kilometers across additionally like all grasses it is quite flammable and given that bamboo colonies are monocarpic perennials which means that the plant colony only reproduces once with the entire colony subsequently dying after going to seed in mass. The timing of this varies from centuries to as little as 40 years but it shouldn't be hard to see why a vast colony of plants some of which can grow up to 120 ft tall drying out and dying in mass is a potential problem and also the reason giant pandas need such large ranges as all your food dying at once is a problem.
While I agree that Bamboo has serious potential the plant has a lot of problems which must be overcome if it is to be scaled up safely outside of its native domain.
@Dragrath1 those are known issues so knowledge is the solution.
Excellent job! I have learned - over many years - that is often best to avoid 'popular science' presentations on subjects where I have real expert knowledge. As a rule, the overly simplistic treatment of complex topics is just too frustrating to enjoy and appreciate. As a forester and specialist in sustainable certification, that should have been the case for this video. But I took a chance. And I'm glad I did!
Your treatment of this remarkably complex topic is nothing short of brilliant. Touching all the important, and usually overlooked, complexities of carbon cycling in forests, you still find a way to introduce the surprising and non-intuitive idea of burying wood as a meaningful option for our uncertain future. I'm still not sure how you managed all this in 7:41, but I'm glad you did. Well done indeed!
This couldn't possibly be more efficient than biochar right? you just bake the wood until it releases woodgas, which you can burn which, yes, releases some CO2, but most of the carbon in the wood just stays as high-porosity carbon that doesn't break down anymore, and you can even add it to soils to increase water and mineral retention? You store most of the wood's carbon, and in so doing, improve soil quality for more wood to grow on. Terra Preta is already well documented too.
Yeah this is old science that wasn’t as glamorous (profitable) to sci show and their green energy buddies. Like no joke they’d rather talk about carbon filters, solar/wind and carbon taxes for yeeeaars but they never talked about biochar.
Plus you can run engines and stuff on woodgas, which is fun and useful!
"A review of 259 studies conducted by the Czech Mendel University in Brno raised concerns about the long-term safety of biochar use. The study found that high doses of biochar can have negative effects on soil and soil life, water availability, and soil erosion."
@@DavidCruickshank good thing there’s a lot of dirt out there
As a forestry student, my biggest concern with this is that while, yes, it removes the carbon from the cycle, it also removes all the nutrients from the cycle. Some lumber companies practice no-waste harvesting, and try to utilize every bit of every tree harvested in an effort to be (or at least appear) environmentally conscious. However, people quickly realized that this just means there are no nutrients from that tree going back into the ecosystem it came from, and it's actually better for the health for the forest to leave the less easily usable timber behind.
Crypt Forests, preserved for the ages in darkness of the Grave is the Goth-iest thing I've heard of, I love it.🖤
Seems like finding and then digging up that kind of clay soil might release more C02 than you can bury under it
As a Canadian who works in Forestry I can tell that although this sounds like an amazing idea, you are going to have a tough time convincing the right people that burying tree under ground even if it's just slash and dead trees is the way they should do it.
Interesting concept and as others have pointed out, the basis of the Carboniferous period. I can't read any more than the editor's summary and abstract from the source, other than basically store trees 2 meters underground in clay. So I'm just throwing some stuff out there... How much volume underground would be needed to take out an appreciable amount of C from the carbon cycle? If we're limited to relatively shallow surface clay, is there enough land area to store the volume of trees needed. Move clay from somewhere else and just pile up over logs? Where does the clay come from and what local/regional effects does that have? Going deeper? What other environmental impacts are we looking at just to move and re-cover even more soil? I'm not saying any of these are unsolvable or insurmountable, just questions that will need to be answered at some point if this concept were to go to full scale.
Video begins at 5:20
Reforesting previously forested areas with the corresponding native species and expanding them into newly habitable areas will "lock up" large amounts of co2. Properly restoring and preserving grassland and bog ecosystems, especially further north, is also very beneficial to carbon storage. Grasslands store an enormous amount of carbon in the soil, while wetlands do this often even more efficiently due to the even greater lack of oxygen and slow speed or almost absence of normal, aerobic decomposition. Areas designated for protection and carbon storage don't have to be unused, there can often be responsible ways of using forests and other ecosystems. Yes of course a forest can burn down and trees are not immortal, but letting an area regenerate with its appropriate vegetation should mitigate the effects of these short releases of carbon dioxide. A forest that is not cut down again or destroyed artificially in some other way will continue to regrow new trees while old ones die. The standing amount of carbon is great all the time and the release in the absence of wildfires or clearcutting is slow and certainly not detrimental. I do not think leaving areas bare and eroded where forests used to be and would still be fully capable of growing makes much sense, aside from obvious obstructions such as settlements, important farmland and so on. There were good points in the video, but it would help to spend more time addressing how we get from not planting trees, to burying trees en masse as to make an actual impact on global atmospheric co2.
Also forest can and WILL burn. The world's largest forest (boreal) is quite literally evolved to burn. Fire is natural and acting like its bad for the environment is incorrect and only misleads people on how they view forest fires.
Just one question. Where would you bury those trees? Where they were felled? In a desert where no plants exist? Some place else? Well, maybe two questions. Exactly what kind of soil would be needed for maximum effect?
Need to have more nuclear power plants over coal or LPG. Also cargo ships, cruise ships etc etc should be nuclear also. That would save unbelievable amount of tons of co2. Co. Nox. Etc etc and leaks of heavy fuels etc. I'm sure some people will argue different.
I suspect they accounted for all the extra co2 from the chainsaw, backhoe, delivery trucks, etc. but I wonder what that amounted to.
I was just thinking about that too. All that hassle may not even be worth it until we actually switch to renewables and greatly reduce our dependency on oil.
Burying the trees is just one piece in a very big puzzle that scientists and people who care are trying to put together. Some pieces might have to be implemented before others are ready to reach the long term goal. Like placing the border pieces on a jigsaw puzzle first while you figure out the inside pieces
"to keep Sci Show going for another year" is a frightening statement.
Should be government funded fr
@@mmmmmmmmdaaaamnnnnbabyyyy I dunno about that, autonomy is a good thing too
Ok, NOW can we talk about biochar? You’re so close. I would love a scishow deep dive.
I’m curious as to the scalability of this, like practically speaking how big and and on whose land are these places with ideal soil conditions located?
This is why I had a big problem with Mark Rober's Team Trees campaign. At best, a misguided, unscientific project that harms more than helps, and at worst, a publicity stunt. His autism campaign has coloured my bias, as an autistic ecology student, towards the latter, but make your own judgment.
Chainsaws and backhoes produce a lot of emissions. Would that process of burying the trees not just increase the co2?
Not likely, the time it takes to harvest a tree is relatively low and electric options are available/being worked on
Disturbing soil releases large amounts of sequestered carbon, so burying trees would be detrimental, inefficient, impractical, and very expensive. Planting/replanting forests properly is a far better technique.
@Willowflat16 I do believe that's why they specifically targeted low carbon content soils like clay
Did they consider the carbon footprint of the machinery to dig said holes, cost of fuel (not only per gallon but also to extract it) and the land for which they plan on burying these trees? Seems like the carbon they'd be storing would be equal to the carbon produced to bury them. Js
Every carbon capture technology fails.
We need ways to reduce co2 instead of buying into "green growth" myths.
Seen several comments talking about the carbon spent to cut down, potentially transport, and then bury the trees- burying the trees is just one piece in a very big puzzle scientists and people who care are trying to figure out. Some things might need to be implemented before others are ready. Think of it like matching all the border pieces on a jigsaw puzzle first while you figure out how to fill in the rest of the puzzle ❤🌲
There are companies already doing this but with much faster growing and much higher turnover algae
Question. would that burial for the tree only really work if the equipment and the saws were electric and charged with solar otherwise wouldn't the machinery just counter what the tree was saving?
Why dont we use wastewater ponds to repeatedly cause and kill algal blooms? Thereby sequestering carbon at the bottom?
Thanks for saying, "A quick mid-roll." Going straight into it without any form of segue has been really jarring.
Use hemp for climate repair and replacing trees for industrial uses
I have always wondered: Would sinking Trees into the ocean also work? If you manage to get them deep enough into the water, they also shouldn't come up again as far as I know.
Unfortunately considering the degree of maturity of people I think this is a REALLY BAD click bait title, I can already imagine people reading this and not watching the video and going away imagining "yeah, trees are not the only solution, we can deforest them"
Not even a matter of maturity, but a quirk of human memory. Pithy, easy to understand title that catches your attention and "sticks" vs nuanced information dump, one is going to get remembered by most watchers and the other forgotten. But then again, trying to educate a widely ignorant populace and trying to do the job of underfunded, poorly managed schools is hard enough, but doing that while *Capitalism!* is pretty much mission impossible.
I thought the same thing. Distasteful and potentially damaging title
there is tones of waste wood from producing lumber and tones of chaff from producing crops like corn and wheat. maybe subsidize burying that waste. subsidizing food and building material while trapping carbon.
I can just imagine a petroleum company exec reading this videos title and going “YEEESSSS”
Dig holes with machines, cut down trees with machines, transport.......You get the idea.
Hopefully we don't go overboard with this, because I don't think anyone wants another Carboniferous.
Wait WHAT
YES! I've been thinking about something like this for years! I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one!
You guys are sometimes way too funny!! Informative and funny? Perfect!!
Hank! I've been thinking about this a lot lately and was wondering if you could do the same with plastics. They have carbon in them and they're getting into lots of places we don't want them. So, maybe bury them?
Using wood and plant products for construction stores carbon for the life of the material. Double handy. Just not in bushfire prone areas, which, here in Australia, limits your options a bit. You can still use it inside.
We just lost so many trees in Helene, and there are massive debris piles everywhere. It'd be nice if there could be some coordination towards burying it as suggested in this video. However I'm not optimistic judging from the disaster removal coordination demonstrated so far.
I agree to this method, but i wanted it coupled with modified RuBisCo bamboo that grows even faster than wild type. If something can eat that much carbon, it's a prime candidate for burial, building, or fuel
Large scale timber structures can sequester carbon while staying useful for decades. New Portland Airport is a good example of many tons of trees being turned into useful permanent products.
What an amazing find in that trench! This is awesome c: thank you so much for the information as always 🎉
I would be interested in the thermals and the efficiency of airflow with this design. The designers justify the designs stating that they were achieving the best cooling efficiency and heat displacement. Looks awesome though! 😅
Man... my wallet hates the undeniable fact that keeping Sci Show running another year is DEFINITELY worth cleaning it out haha
I on the other hand love Sci Show and supporting some of my favorite science creators out there
eucalyptus tree's in California are a problem because in Australia where they evolved they specifically evolved highly flammable oil to spread their seed's to germinate. along with draining a lot of water from the environment, an example of this is that if you plant a eucalyptus tree in one you can drain a wetland if planted in them, the wildfires in california can be greatly reduced by cutting down and removing eucalyptus tree's from the state to prevent the seed's from taking root,
Please never go away you are so dear to me
Can you rub one out somewhere else please
@3:25 we’re almost there, just a few disclaimers, TLDR:But go plant natives if you want them to grow
I'd imagine that finding large plots of soil that have the ideal conditions to bury trees would be difficult, and disturbing soil is very damaging to the environment. Converting dead or harvested trees into biochar might be a better means of sequestering carbon.
sounds like a decent option, but if we keep emitting larger and larger amounts every year, it won't even matter. also, aside from the co2 emitted from wood decaying, it is also creating more rich soil to further the biological growth, that is in turn concentrating the carbon into cellulose.
there was another vid i saw about trees from the PBS channel last year i think; talking about how planting new trees actually produces carbon... trees dont become 'carbon sinks' until they are more old growth forests vs small/new trees. that grasslands/plains might be better carbon sinks for the US as its what a lot of our habitat used to be (in the midwest anyway)
Would burying compressed charcoal in spent coal mines be an effective idea? It popped into my head because why not put coal back into the ground where we took it from? It'd definitely be a good visual at the least for those who have trouble visualizing how much carbon we need to store
Correct. In fact charcoal is better because you don’t have to bury it as deep to avoid bugs, because they can’t digest it and it’s very good for the soil. Google Terra Preta.
could also drop them in deep lakes or the open ocean beyond the continental shelf. could also use bailed hay. would be cheap, but requires a real carbon credit system. maybe require oil companies removing oil from the continental shelf to drop an equivalent amount of carbon in the deep ocean.
So requiring everyone to grow hemp plants and then putting them down in the ground would be a huge benefit where smoking the THC version would put back up in the atmosphere . I'm just thinking out loud
Founding distruptive solutions to non existing problems, is what is all about, it seems.
Problem's always* going to be the time it takes to grow a tree and the land it takes to do so. Doesn't mean it isn't a great pillar for an approach that uses multiple techniques (including maybe not burning quite so much to begin with.)
*I am not a time-traveler.
Remember how one of the main objections to the Silurian Hypothesis (that there was a non-human civilization long enough ago to have been forgotten) is "there's still oil in the ground"?
Maybe they put it back, to solve their own carbon capture problem.
Now the tree burial seems extremely easy, but you're saying it just after explaining how hard tree planting is. So what's the deal? Is it a useless idea after all? I'm really tempted to ask how we could make a solution for continuous carbon storage "production" out of this.
So my understanding is that forests can also increase temperature because the dark green canopy can capture heat ...
I may not fully understand what he meant but is this changing the issue to storing carbons
Strangely, this also feels like the first step in Creating Future Oil/Coal... Fossil Fuels being made from plants trapped beneath the surface with heat and pressure, Maybe for a future that is more responsible in using them...
I would consider that anyone actually planting trees would know that they would have to plant trees that are both local species AND that are appropriate for the place being planted.
That is entirely obvious to the process, and I was surprised that it was even stated as part of the video.
We could use more wood in construction as long as it doesn't impact the integrity too much. If hidden behind enough insulation, wooden beams do suprisingly well during fires.
Wether we bury them or use them for our buildings, as long as we keep emitting that much co2 neither will make a significant difference.
Wow what a full circle, science
Where would these tree graveyards be located? They would need very specific soil types and large areas of that soil. Plus the burial couldn't be on land that is actively being used. This is not a way to store large amounts of carbon.
This video left a few questions unanswered for me. What about the great green wall in Africa? Is that harming native wildlife? I can't imagine that it does, even though it's not naturally occuring. Also, what about the Co2 emissions coming from the excavation machines/ vehicles, or just the energy going into all of the planning and preparation for such a project? Is it really worth it to do all of this excavation (which also releases high levels of carbon) to bury a few trees? Maybe this would be great on an individual scale, if people are just digging trenches on their own property to bury their yard waste, but on a large scale? Would it still be a great benefit to do this?
Three and a half thousand years old? Neat. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand we have swamp kauri that's pushing 60,000 years. There's even some that was buried when the volcano that is now Lake Taupō erupted. You can tell it was because it's in the same sedimentary layer as volcanic ash, and all the trees are lying pointing away from the lake.
The Romans inadvertently did carbon storage with their concrete. The volcanic ash is sequestered in buildings that stand for millenia. Imagine how much ash is dropped wholesale instead of (inadvertently) recycled like the Romans did.
I know the new phrase is carbon capture, but the real culprit is, as noted, carbon dioxide. The energy absorption mechanism lies in the atomic bonds between the carbon and oxygen molecules, not in carbon itself. It works the same way in microwave ovens - the hydrogen-oxygen bonds absorb energy (at 2.4 Ghz for one). Removing hydrogen (or oxygen) would not change that.
I believe I read where somewhere in Japan they planned to build a skyscraper out of wood ?
I will be VERY impressed if that works out, but afaik wood structures can't support that kind of weight
Im a Silvicultrist and have tried to explain this to people before, and didn't get to far in convincing people. It is somewhat counterintuitive and how forests work is complicated. Humans don't like that, and people love trees. Uphill battle.
So if we need to bury these trees deep underground, would mines that have been closed be good candidates for burying sites?
What happens with the wood we turn into furniture? I imagine that since we generally try and keep our furniture from rotting that particular wood is holding its carbon?
This is interesting but what happens when we run out of ground? There's a lot more ground than surface but we can only dig a certain distance before CO2 production is required to practically go deeper. Also what happens if these fossils get unearthed? They're like CO2 bombs.
Yall should think about doing patches. That'd be awesome!
Why bury trees vs log them and process them for building things, like buildings and furniture?
I'm sure it's way more complicated than it is in my head but it seems to me like using that money to subsidize/stabilize the cost of lumber (similar to corn) would be more effective? It would lead to more trees being planted in farming operations while simultaneously making wood cheaper. If the wood is cheap enough that means it's more likely to be used in applications like furniture and construction and even things like single use containers/cutlery that would sequester it for shorter than the video's example but still likely longer than it would otherwise be in nature.
THe problem here is that, the ecosystem can't handle that. We not only have a climate crisis but also a biodiversity crisis. Meaning that too many species and plants are dying.
So there is problem with the profit logic and you won't solve it by putting money into the system. Because this will cause certain wood to be planted (needle trees, because they grow fast and straight). Here in Germany i often see the effects of this. Needle tree forests are not natural here. Some perecentage of needle trees is ok but it being 100% is unnatural and causes many problems that we now see more drastically with climate change. One example is that they do not hold as much water. The leafs of leaf-trees are good for the ground because they go down every fall. They also make the rain fall slower. They have more surface area to stay wet and produce more humidity if the sun hits it. The lack of leaf trees causes forests to have a lack of water OR having too much water. This results in eather no water flowing out and a dry spelll OR it results in too much water flowing out, causing/adding to a flood.
I hope it was understandable. And this is just one aspect.
What i find important is that we use the wood we have in good manner. Furniture cna hold decades or sometimes hundred of years. THats good use. But using wood for products that hold only a few months or years won't cut it. I mean i absolutly love wood cutlery, but metal is so much more durable that its by far more efficient. We need to look at our material foot print. Co2 is not everything there is. sadly.
@@Rithmy Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. On cutlery, I wasn't suggesting we replace metal but was still thinking of single-use typically plastic disposable stuff. Here in the us they give them out constantly for anything. I guess the problem isn't just that wood is expensive but that worse materials are cheap too.
I wonder if SALT MINES could be filled with logs. Not sure if salt would preserve them. We have the mines already in heavily treed areas.
Didn't watch the video, but I've been chopping since I read the title :)
It's hard work but it's all worth it! ❤🌏🌱
Do trees also release CO2 in the winter time?
I'd be very interested in finding ways to keep currently existing forest well hydrated. Most of the fires we're seeing are mainly due to drought. We're already pretty good at irrigation, why can't we apply it to forests and grasslands?
Some of the ecosystems where fires are prevalent actually rely on the annual fire season to maintain said ecosystem long term. We would need to be careful not to disrupt the ones where fire is beneficial. Also if we can collectively lessen our co2 output across the world we would regain more stable weather patterns and not have to worry so much about places having new drought issues.
@@nmgg6928 I'm all about perfect solutions, but I've also learned through experience that more achievable and affordable ones should also be considered, sometimes with priority. What would you say is more accessible - watering some existing forests or changing the air composition of the planet by burring trees underground?
This could be a good thing for old disused mines.
Burying Carbon underground, I think there's a word for that, Coal.
How much offset would it really be with the fossil fuel burning chainsaws, excavation equipment, and transportation methods?
fill old mineshafts with wood chip maybe? since very deep mines had to have fresh air pumped in.
I used to say this as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense: what if wasting paper is good for the environment? Placing paper in a landfill is very similar to burying the whole tree (with extra, polluting steps of course, but not the point).
So I'll argue, wasting and landfilling paper is a form of sequestration and better than recycling paper...
I would say that may make sense if we ensure that all the wasted paper or wood is gonna be properly recycled or, as mentioned here, buried