Dead wood can persist for more than a hundred times longer in rivers and floodplains than on land, sequestering carbon for centuries and even millennia, according to Richard Guyette of the University of Missouri in Columbia and his colleagues.
Although their terrestrial neighbours degrade within decades, the submerged oaks that Guyette's team studied held their carbon for an average of almost 2,000 years. The team found oak wood up to 14,000 years old in northern Missouri streambeds and floodplains.
The samples are among the oldest non-petrified oak trees known in North America. The aged wood retains its rings, and is a potential source of palaeoclimatic data.
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Climate science: A watery carbon bank. Nature 454, 140 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/454140a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/454140a
