Study: Tree bark absorbs large amounts of methane from the atmosphere

The University of Birmingham’s media office notes that the Earth’s trees absorb up to 49 million tons of methane from the air per year.

“We have long assumed that the main contribution of trees to the Earth’s carbon cycle is that they absorb carbon dioxide and convert it into biomass, but our observations have shown that plants at least influence the Earth’s climate in another way that we had not thought of before,” says Professor Vincent Gaussé from the university.

The researchers made the discovery by monitoring the circulation of all the major greenhouse gases around trees growing in different climate zones on Earth (tropical regions in Brazil and Panama, mixed forests in the United Kingdom and the northern taiga in Sweden), deploying a large array of sensors to measure the concentration of different gases around tree crowns, bark, roots and other components. The measurements showed that the bark of trees around the world absorbs methane, so its concentration in the air around them decreases.

The researchers found that the trees themselves do not absorb methane, but rather through colonies of methane-eating bacteria that live on the surface of the bark, where they absorb methane from the air, oxidize it and convert it into biomass and carbon dioxide, which has a much less impact on the climate than the original hydrocarbon. The researchers link the rapid absorption of methane by tropical tree bark to the acceleration of microbial metabolism in the warm, humid climate of Brazil and Panama.

According to scientists’ estimates, the bark of all the Earth’s trees combined absorbs 25-49 million tons of methane, which increases the beneficial contribution of plants to combating global warming by about 10 percent.

The researchers recommend that these findings be taken into account when forecasting climate change in the coming decades, as well as when developing measures to use agriculture to accelerate the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Source: TASS