The dead wood mass of countless fallen trees and ancient wood accumulated in the river in Nunavut is up to 51 square kilometers and contains 3.1 million tons of carbon .
A team of scientists at Colorado State University used high-resolution satellite imagery and artificial intelligence (AI) to map the world’s largest logjam in the Mackenzie River Delta in Nunavut, region. Canada’s largest and most northern territory, IFL Science reported on April 14. New research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters .
The Mackenzie River Delta in Canada has the largest accumulation of dead wood in the world. (Photo: Alicia Sendrowski).
This block of wood is up to 51km 2 , including countless fallen trees and ancient wood accumulated in the river . Scientists believe that its possible impact on the Earth’s carbon cycle is much larger than they previously thought. The entire block of dead wood is almost as wide as Manhattan, can be divided into 400,000 small cells, the largest cell is equivalent to 20 football fields.
Trees act as a carbon sink for the Earth, sucking CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in wood. As such, they significantly influence the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and climate change. However, according to the team, dead wood blocks are often overlooked when assessing their impact on the broader environment.
“Such dead wood blocks need to be studied, not only for the carbon cycle, but also for us to understand how natural river systems work, how rivers transport and distribute wood,” Virginia Ruiz-Villanueva , a geomorphologist at the University of Lausanne, said.
New research estimates that deadwood in the Mackenzie Delta stores about 3.1 million tons of carbon – a large amount even on a global scale. “That’s equivalent to the emissions of about 2.5 million cars a year,” explains engineer Alicia Sendrowski at Colorado State University, who led the study.
The new study only measured the surface of the dead wood, so it couldn’t calculate the hidden wood underneath, meaning the true scale of this carbon storage could be even larger. Wood piles up here for many reasons.
First, Arctic drift is often transported over large areas due to large boreal forests and high-latitude river networks. In addition, the Mackenzie Delta is also very wide, allowing dead wood to accumulate. Finally, the cold and dry conditions of the Arctic make it possible for wood to remain in near-perfect condition for tens of thousands of years. Some of the trees in the dead wood, the team said, appear to have been felled last winter, but are actually decades or centuries old.