By Sabrina Imbler and Eden Weingart
Trapped in ground so wet that it could not decompose, the dead moss instead piled up, each layer pressing those beneath into a thick, muddy mass called peat.
Headway
By Sabrina Imbler
Illustrations by Eden Weingart
Feb. 22, 2022
Over thousands of years, a mossy landscape lived and died …
but it did not decay.
For centuries, humans have wandered onto those soggy stretches of moss and asked the same question: What is a peatland good for?
You can’t build a house on it (too soft),
or grow crops there (too soggy),
and all that stagnant water conjures a timeless fear (mosquitos, and then malaria).
But scientists eventually learned that thick brown peat holds a secret: vast stores of carbon sealed underground — and out of the atmosphere — making the muck one of the world’s best carbon sinks.
Although peatlands make up just 3 percent of land on Earth, they store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined.
Peatlands can take on many forms, from wetlands’ greatest hits — bogs and fens — to deeper cuts: pocosins, palsa, blanket bogs and tropical peat swamp forests.
The secret of many peatlands is sphagnum mosses — starry green sprouts that can hold up to 26 times their weight in water. On drier ground, dead plants rot and send their carbon back into the soil or atmosphere.
But a peatland is so soggy that even the deadest shrub can’t fully decompose, meaning its carbon stays put.
This peculiar limbo isn’t just for plants. A peatland also prevents other things from decay, trapping an archive of thousands of years of life and death underground with all that carbon.
Anything that happens to fall into a peat bog might be preserved, if a little the worse for wear:
2,000-year-old lumps of butter,
a 4,700-year-old wheel,
a 10,500-year-old canoe.
Bogs turn thousand-year-old human bodies into mummies so lifelike they have been mistaken for modern murder victims.
In a way, a peatland is less a land than a memory of what has existed on it — where life is not lost but preserved in muddy murk.
It takes 1,000 years for a meter deep of peat to form. But not very long to destroy it.
Before it was celebrated as the world’s best carbon sink, peat was a popular energy source. Peat burned hotter than wood and was far less dangerous to mine than coal — all you need is a sharp hoe and a couple of arms.
The Dutch, with few forests left to burn, harvested enough peat in the 17th century to help usher in a golden age of wealth, science and art.
Elsewhere, humans saw peatlands as ugly mud that stood in the way of valuable crops.
Vast tracts of Indonesia’s tropical peatlands were drained and razed into oil palm plantations.
In Canada, home to a quarter of the world’s northern peatlands, expanses of peat have been drained to build mines and roads and flooded for hydroelectric dams.
Today, humans have already drained about 15 percent of the world’s peatlands.
As we began to understand the threat of climate change, forests emerged as a natural solution, spawning plans to plant a million, a billion, a trillion trees.
But we paid little attention to peatlands, the unsung heroes of carbon capture.
A disturbed peatland, though, can become a villain — morphing from a carbon sink into a carbon spewer.
Drained peatlands emit about a dizzying two billion tons of accumulated carbon every year.
This number is only expected to rise as the world warms and peatlands dry out, priming the land to catch fire and burn.
In other words, the world’s peatlands are becoming a vicious climate feedback loop: peat drying and burning and drying and burning.
The most damaged peatlands may never return to their golden days as carbon sinks. But they are surprisingly resilient, and can be revived to a point where they are on the way to storing carbon again.
To heal a peatland, you need to rewet it: blocking any drains or canals to recreate the original, waterlogged conditions that thwart plants from total decay. The soggier, the boggier.
In the meantime, new peatlands continue to be discovered, including a Peruvian swamp forest teeming with fruit, a tropical peat swamp larger than England in the Congo Basin, and forest fens in the Rocky Mountains that harbor plant species that have stuck around since the Ice Age.
The planet would be better off if we left them alone.
A protected peatland can preserve all the riches lurking in its thick brown depths: bones, butter, and world-changing stores of carbon.
There is still time to put peatlands, long manipulated, forever overlooked, on their rightful pedestal as nature’s champion against climate change.
What else do you want to know about peat?
Over the next few weeks, we’re collecting all your questions and curiosities about peatlands. No question is too big or too small. We’ll gather all of your responses and consult the most knowledgeable people we know on the subject of peatlands, wetlands and climate change. We’ll message you back with what we’ve found.
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