Berkeley Lab scientists take soil samples at Blodgett Forest (Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt/Berkeley Lab)
A new study led by Berkeley Lab has provided the first physical evidence that warmer temperatures lead to a significant drop in the stored carbon stock in deep forest soils. An experiment in California’s Sierra Nevada forest found that the carbon content in subsoils dropped 33% over five years.
The research team, led by Margaret Torn, artificially heated plots of soil down to 1 meter deep by 4 degrees Celsius, which is the amount of heating projected by century’s end in a business-as-usual climate scenario. (The heating followed natural diurnal and seasonal cycles.) “We heated the whole soil profile, whereas most experiments just heat the surface,” Torn said. “That deeper soil has a very large stock of carbon and because it’s old people have assumed that it’s also stable. But we’re saying, nope, actually, you can lose this deep, older carbon.”
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