World's Biggest Peatland Is In Congo; The Size Of England, It Holds 33 Billion Tons Of Carbon

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Pound for pound, peat is an incredibly carbon-rich soil. Over thousands of years, peatlands can build up into deposits tens of feet thick. Peatlands cover just 3 percent of the earth, but stockpile twice as much carbon as all of the world’s trees and one-fifth of all the carbon stored in soils. If just a third of this peatland burned, the amount of CO2 in the air would double. Scientists say a change like that in the composition of the atmosphere could warm the planet about 5 degrees Fahrenheit, a catastrophic rise.

Fortunately, these carbon repositories, mostly in temperate and polar regions, seem safe for now. Locals and some scientists had known about the flooded forests in the Cuvette Centrale, but hardly anyone thought the soil was peat. Dargie’s discovery astounded and rattled many scientists.

“ … We thought the number was too high and we had to go back and check it,” recalled Dargie. There was no mistake. Her results showed that the deposit contained 33 billion U.S. tons of carbon, as much as in all the trees in the entire Congo rain forest, an area 13 times bigger. “It’s a whacking big stock of carbon,” says William Laurence, an ecology professor and tropical forest expert at James Cook University in Australia. “Everybody was surprised,” he says.

But it worried them, too. If those peatlands caught fire it could let off three times more carbon than the annual global output of all human activities. It would also destroy an efficient source of carbon storage.

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/09/inside-search-for-africa-carbon-time-bomb-peatland/