The Weekly Anthropocene, May 3 2023
Ancient logjams in the Mackenzie River Delta, a network of electric truck stops, robots for environmental science, bowhead whales in the Chukchi Sea, and more!
Northwest Territories, Canada
A new study in Geophysical Research Letters has made the first full scientific description of a highly understudied carbon sink: vast, ancient logjams in Northern Canada’s Arctic river deltas. (Fallen timber in other river deltas tends to decompose, but it’s preserved in the far north). The researchers found over 400,000 individual wood deposits in the Northwest Territories’ Mackenzie River delta, and used high-resolution satellite imagery to estimate that at least 3.1 × 1012 grams of carbon (3.1 million metric tonnes) are stored in all this wood1. There could be up to twice carbon as much if there’s more timber that’s been buried by sediments or overgrown by vegetation.
Carbon dating revealed that about 40% of the trees in the logjam are from 1955 or later, but that some had been there much longer, stretching back to 700 CE! Furthermore, there are a dozen other Arctic river deltas of comparable size that probably have unmapped wo…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Weekly Anthropocene to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.