26 years ago he started an experiment that has been going on all this time and that tries to discover how it affects the increase in temperature to forest soils. The response that the scientists have obtained reveals a cyclical and surprising response.
Do you want to know more about the discovery of this research and its relevance?
Wooded soils
The result obtained from this experiment is as follows: warming the soil stimulates periods of abundant release of carbon from it into the atmosphere, alternating with periods of no detectable loss in underground carbon storage. This makes it cyclical and that means that, in a world where temperatures are increasingly higher, there will be more terrains in which carbon self-feedback will occur, which will add to the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide due to burning fossil fuels and will contribute to accelerated global warming.
In other words, there will be periods when wooded soils will emit more carbon into the atmosphere and periods when they will not. That period will be intensified by rising global temperatures which will cause the ground to warm up and, therefore, emit more carbon into the atmosphere.
The study is the work of Jerry Melillo's team, from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL, for its acronym in English), linked to the University of Chicago, in the United States.
Experiment
The experiment began in 1991, when in an area of deciduous forest in a Massachusetts forest they buried electrical cables in some plots. To simulate global warming, they heated the ground five degrees above room temperature to compare between them. After 26 years that still continue, the plots that increased their temperature by five degrees, they lost 17% of the carbon it has been storing in organic matter.
This makes the danger of global warming increasingly imminent and more difficult to stop.