Iceland’s forest and bush cover has increased sixfold since 1990

Re:Iceland’s forest and bush cover has increased sixfold sin... by mschuster91 on Monday July 18, 2022 @09:29AM (#32138120)

No, because as soon as a tree is dead it will begin to rot and decompose (there's fungi everywhere in the air that is just waiting for a piece of juicy fresh tree to digest), thereby releasing CO2, methane and other decomposition gases.

The only way to sequester CO2 using trees is keeping the trees alive (or blasting them with chemicals to prevent rotting).

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Re:Iceland’s forest and bush cover has increased sixfold sin... by spenczar5 on Monday July 18, 2022 @10:17AM (#32138673)

If you bury the trees reasonably deep, that CO2 takes a very long time to get to the surface (like tens of thousands of years) so it’s good enough for our purposes.

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Re:Iceland’s forest and bush cover has increased sixfold sin... by BurningFrog on Monday July 18, 2022 @10:09AM (#32138573)

You can also weigh it down and sink it to the bottom of oceans that don't have wood eating organisms. The Baltic and the Black Sea are the ones I know.

But of course, the solution you mention is the simplest: Treat the wood with one of the several known ways to make it not break down, and leave it in big piles somewhere.

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Re:Iceland’s forest and bush cover has increased sixfold sin... by gilleain on Monday July 18, 2022 @10:23AM (#32138740)

Thus my friend's idea to CRISPR plants so that they deposit their carbon in some indigestible polymer that will not rot for the foreseeable future.

I'm sure there are no possible repercussions to doing this.

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Re:Iceland’s forest and bush cover has increased sixfold sin... by Baeocystin on Monday July 18, 2022 @02:40PM (#32141774)

I mean, it worked for the Carboniferous, until some cheeky fungus figured out how to digest lignin. But we had a nice 60 million year run, and got lots of useful hydrocarbons out of it, so hey!

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Re:Iceland’s forest and bush cover has increased sixfold sin... by krallja on Monday July 18, 2022 @12:28PM (#32140143)

Truly bioengineering at a galactic scale. In a hundred million years, geological processes will have turned your polymers into some cool new exotic fuel source.

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Re:Iceland’s forest and bush cover has increased sixfold sin... by imtringued on Tuesday July 19, 2022 @05:57AM (#32149479)

Plants send glucose down their roots to feed mycorrhizal fungi which build up soil organic matter.

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Re:Iceland’s forest and bush cover has increased sixfold sin... by KptMarchewa on Monday July 18, 2022 @01:37PM (#32140948)

The idea is to cover the trees with something (soil, and large amount of it)?

If they rot the CO2 will still be below the surface?

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Re:Iceland’s forest and bush cover has increased sixfold sin... by yellowapple on Monday July 18, 2022 @03:57PM (#32142867)

> or blasting them with chemicals to prevent rotting

That's kind of a given. People generally don't like it when their homes and furniture decompose.

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Re:Iceland’s forest and bush cover has increased sixfold sin... by slavik81 on Monday July 18, 2022 @11:40AM (#32139609)

After a tree dies, how long does it take before it returns all its carbon to the atmosphere?

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