Around two per cent of the world’s land mass consists of waterlogged peatland, but new research published in Nature Geoscience has warned that rising temperatures could dry these areas out, causing them to release large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, exacerbating global warming.

Peat, a deposit of partially decomposed and often ancient saturated vegetation, is found in cold and temperate climates such those found in northern latitudes, where they have historically functioned as a carbon sink, sequestering large amounts of soil-organic carbon in the cold, largely waterlogged soils. But conclusions drawn from computer models run at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMEST) suggest that a 4°C rise in temperature could cause peatlands in Canada, Russia and Alaska to release 40 per cent of the carbon contained in shallow peat deposits and as much as 86 per cent of the carbon stored within deep deposits.

‘This will cause carbon loss from the soil, which means an increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, which will further worsen global warming,’ Takeshi Ise from JAMEST told Reuters.

December 2008