[Stoves] Sequestering carbon -

[Anand Karve]

Dear Stovers,


Some time ago I had expressed the opinion that the formation of mineral
coal during the Carboniferous Era was due to the fact that the microbes
that could degrade lignin were absent at that time. The fact that the
Chernobil-affected trees are also not rotting because of the same reason
gives support to my hypothesis.

Yours

A.D.Karve

***
Dr. A.D. Karve

Chairman, Samuchit Enviro Tech Pvt Ltd (www.samuchit.com)

Trustee & Founder President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI)

On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 8:39 PM, Frank Shields <franke at cruzio.com> wrote:

> The dead trees and fallen leaves near Chernobyl aren't decaying
>
> March 17, 2014 | by Janet Fang
> photo credit: Radioactivity warning sign on a hill at the east end of Red
> Forest / Timm Suess via Wikimedia
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>
> It's been nearly 30 years since the catastrophe at Chernobyl, and as the
> cleanup grinds on
> <http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110328/full/471562a.html>, the
> far-reaching effects continue to be documented. Birds with smaller brains
> <http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9387000/9387395.stm>, increasing
> spiders, decreasing butterflies
> <http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/fukushima-vs-chernobyl-how-have-animals-fared/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0>,
> all these and more have been reported from the areas surrounding Chernobyl.
> One group you don't hear very much about are the decomposers -- those bugs,
> microbes, fungi, and slime molds who nourish themselves by consuming the
> remains of dead organisms. Without these recyclers, carbon, nitrogen, and
> other elements essential to life would be locked in plant corpses.
>
> The effects of radioactive contamination on the decay of plant material
> remains unknown... until now. Scientists examining the forests around
> Chernobyl have found that radioactive contamination has reduced the rate
> of litter mass loss
> <http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00442-014-2908-8>. The dead
> leaves on the forest floor, along with the dead pine trees in the infamous Red
> Forest <http://www.nsrl.ttu.edu/chornobyl/redforest.htm>, don't seem to
> be decaying -- even a couple decades after the incident.
>
> "Apart from a few ants, the dead tree trunks were largely unscathed when
> we first encountered them," study researcher Timothy Mousseau of the
> University of South Carolina
> <http://cricket.biol.sc.edu/Mousseau/Mousseau.html>tells Smithsonian
> <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around-chernobyl-arent-decaying-properly-180950075/?no-ist>.
> "It was striking, given that in the forests where I live, a fallen tree is
> mostly sawdust after a decade of lying on the ground."
>
> Mousseau and an international team led by Anders Pape Møller from
> Université Paris-Sud
> <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_chernobyl/all/>decided to
> investigate the accumulation of litter, which was two to three times
> thicker in the areas where radiation poisoning was most intense. They
> predicted that decomposing rate would be reduced in the most contaminated
> sites due to the absence or reduced densities of soil invertebrates and
> microorganisms.
>
> To test this, the team filled 572 small mesh bags with dry leaves from
> four species of trees -- oak, maple, birch, pine -- collected from
> uncontaminated sites. They deposited the bags in the leaf litter layer at
> 20 forest sites around Chernobyl in September 2007; these sites varied a
> ton in background radiation, some by more than a factor of 2,600. All the
> bags were retrieved about a year later in June 2008, dried, and weighed to
> estimate litter mass loss.
>
> They found that the litter loss was 40 percent lower in the most
> contaminated sites; that is, there was a lot more litter left over in those
> bags than in the bags placed in normal Ukraine radiation levels. (In those
> areas with no contamination, 70 to 90 percent of the litter in the bags
> were gone.) The thickness of the forest floor increased with the level of
> radiation and decreased with loss of mass from all litter bags. Simply put,
> the more lingering radiation, the fewer the decomposers, the more dried
> leaves left in the bags.
>
> Additionally, a quarter of the bags deposited were made of a fine mesh
> (like pantyhose) that prevented access by soil invertebrates. By comparing
> the normal mesh bags with the fine mesh bags, they found that litter loss
> was slightly greater in the presence of large soil invertebrates than in
> their absence. So while insects played some role in breaking down the
> leaves, microbes and fungi played a much more important role.
>
> "The gist of our results was that the radiation inhibited microbial
> decomposition of the leaf litter on the top layer of the soil," Mousseau
> explains
> <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around-chernobyl-arent-decaying-properly-180950075/?no-ist>.
> The accumulation of litter means that nutrients aren't being efficiently
> returned to the soil, he adds, which could explain why tree are growing at
> a slower rate around Chernobyl.
>
> The work <http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00442-014-2908-8> was
> published in *Oecologia* this month.
>
>
>
> Frank Shields
> franke at cruzio.com
>
>
>
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