Ancient piece of driftwood hidden for thousands of years could hold secrets for combating climate change

A really old and remarkably well-preserved log buried almost 4,000 years ago provides key evidence to support a simple and effective way of locking away carbon to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — burying dead trees in giant graveyards — scientists say.

In a paper published Sept. 26 in the journal Science, researchers describe the discovery of a 3,775-year-old log in Saint-Pie, Quebec, Canada. This stump was unearthed during a 2013 project that aimed to identify sites for so-called wood vaults, which entomb woody biomass under a layer of clay soil to prevent reentry of carbon to the atmosphere.

Wood vaulting is a form of biological carbon sequestration — utilizing the ability of living things to capture carbon. Lead author Ning Zeng, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland who has a company aiming to commercialize the Technology, first published research on burying wood to sequester carbon in a 2008 paper.

The log, "is a single data point," Zeng told Live Science. "But it tells you: if you bury wood under these conditions, it's going to work. So it's a very critical data point. It's really immediately implementable."

The log, which belonged to an Eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana), was discovered beneath 6.5 feet (2 meters) of blue clay near the edge of a creek bed.

"It's driftwood. It just got dumped there — possibly during a flooding event," Zeng said.

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