Dead trees keep surprisingly large amounts of carbon out of atmosphere

Posted by PaulHoule 4/14/2025

Dead trees keep surprisingly large amounts of carbon out of atmosphere(phys.org)

91 points | 86 commentspage 2

mapt 4/14/2025|

The question is how much of that carbon turns to methane in organic decomposition.

If that fraction isn't negligible, we'd be better off burning it. Determining that fraction, across a range of conditions, is nontrivial.

everdrive 4/14/2025||

I'm very confused by this -- does the rate rate of carbon release matter more than the total volume? Won't the carbon in the trees eventually be released, just on a slower timeframe.

mikepurvis 4/14/2025||

Sure, but it being delayed still matters a lot, particularly if it's "renewable" in the sense that trees falling into streams and being preserved underwater will be replaced over time by other trees that fall into that water on top of them.

It's the same logic for construction materials. A house has dozens of trees worth of lumber in it, and that carbon is now trapped in the house for however many decades it takes until the house eventually burns down or rots. Meanwhile the trees that were cut regrew, so the total "inventory" of trapped carbon has increased. (Appreciating of course that the lifetime carbon cost of the emissions required to maintain and climate-control a house will far exceed the modest value of what is trapped in its walls, but all of this is just for the sake of argument.)

WastedCucumber 4/14/2025||

I'm not sure what you question is getting at, but yes, the carbon will eventually be released from any wood. If wood-as-carbon-storage was going to be actively applied towards climate change, then it would be important to control the rate of released, by, for example, using the wood in buildings, burying it, or submerging it in water, so that it wouldn't decompose from fungus or termites.

f4c39012 4/14/2025||

my old boss had an idea - "bury trees".

There's a bit of nuance to be filled out, like challenges of forest plantation monoculture and so on, but it always sounded quite practical to me. Iirc the idea derived from "coal".

triceratops 4/14/2025||

If you can do it without emitting more net carbon - chopping down and moving trees, digging holes - it might work.

bluGill 4/14/2025|||

The right forest fire will turn trees into charcoal and sequester the carbon. However doing this correctly is really tricky. There are many different forests and they all have slightly different needs. Make sure your government allocates enough money to proper forest management. Make sure that you oppose "environmental" groups that have heard smokey the bear years ago and think all fire is bad thus they get court injunctions against prescribed burning to the long term harm of the forest.

pfdietz 4/14/2025|||

There has been a proposal to salt and bury biomass. At sufficiently high salt concentration anaerobic decomposition becomes energetically unfavorable. It wouldn't have to be wood from large trees.

marcusverus 4/14/2025|||

I've considered something like this. Log on the lee side of a mountain range, haul the logs (downhill!) to the arid plain on the lee side, stack loosely, repeat. An electrified highway could allow much of the process to be powered via nuke energy.

Basically any place where you've got high timber production within a reasonably short distance of an arid area could make for a relatively low-tech sequestration/storage pipeline.

Cycl0ps 4/14/2025|||

Carbon sequestration!

I grew up in an area known for coal and logging. Ever since I heard of sequestration brought up I thought the area sounded perfect for it. Fell (maybe mulch) the trees, kiln dry to remove weight/moisture, and toss them down a mineshaft.

It always felt a bit peotic to 'reseed' a coal mine

jagger27 4/14/2025|||

Kiln drying is an interesting idea to speed it up and prevent premature rot, but might offset some of the carbon impact since most industrial kilns use fossil fuels directly or upstream if electric.

Maybe it would be more effective to drop wet lumber off in the desert for a few years by rail before moving the dry lumber to permanent underground storage. This assumes two stages of transport to and from the desert would cost less carbon than transport to a kiln and then to storage.

I’m not convinced that the wood even needs to be dried before burying, though.

AngryData 4/15/2025|||

Ehh if you are just going to bury it kiln drying wouldn't really be that helpful. Wood in open air will dry out pretty well just sitting for two years. Commercial wood is only really kiln dried so that nobody has to store it for a year or two first and they can sell it before as much of it warps and twists due to being cut while green which makes less of it able to be sold. With a large enough pile, even if it is left uncovered, only the top couple logs or boards will get wet from the rain and if a small percentage of it rots or grows some fungus, well it wasn't there to get built into other things anyways so it doesn't matter.

1970-01-01 4/14/2025|||

1. Build out nuclear fission (100x current use)

2. Store spent fuel in massive wooden dry caskets. (500-1000x steel)

3a. Float caskets to Antarctica

3b. Offload via rail to South Pole

4. They stay frozen for a million years and don't rot. Problem solved.

lupusreal 4/14/2025||

Problem is nuclear reactors just don't make all that much spent fuel, so the amount of wood used to crate it up would be negligible.

Edit: I think I've thought of a good alternative though. Instead of crating up the nuclear waste, it could be randomly dispersed in forests around the world to scare people away from those forests, thereby creating nature reserves which should last for generations.

beezlewax 4/14/2025|||

Better yet sink them in the deeper parts of the ocean. Below a certain depth wood loses its buoyancy due to the pressure levels of the water. (I think)

pixl97 4/14/2025|||

Unfortunately we don't really have enough deep freshwater to bury them in. Below the thermocline freshwater has little oxygen and logs can last till the turn to fossils.

With saltwater it's a bit trickier because it's decently oxygenated even to depth and there is a lot of life dedicated to breaking down wood in the ocean. If you can get it to sink into the muck it lasts a lot longer though.

jagger27 4/14/2025|||

Of course, ships sink all the time.

parpfish 4/14/2025|||

Why do you have to bury them? Can’t you just let the logs sit on the forest floor?

triceratops 4/14/2025|||

Decomposition returns carbon dioxide to the air. Or worse, methane, if there isn't enough oxygen.

parpfish 4/14/2025||

Don’t things decompose underground as well?

triceratops 4/14/2025||

The carbon stays underground.

bryanlarsen 4/14/2025||||

They release their carbon as they rot or otherwise consumed. That's why the article talks about wood in cold streams, which rots very slowly.

myfonj 4/14/2025|||

In the long term they will decompose and return vast majority of its carbon back into atmosphere. Blame fungi and bacteria.

lotsofpulp 4/14/2025||

Maybe we can make coal powered earth movers in order to bury the trees.

returntooffice 4/14/2025|

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