99% Invisible - 417- For the Love of Peat

Episode Date: October 14, 2020

When we think about carbon storage, we tend to think about forests, but peatlands are also incredible carbon sinks. In Europe, peatlands contain five times more carbon than forests. But back in the 80s, most people didn't know this remarkable fact about peat. If anything, bogs were seen as scary places to be avoided and thus we tended to not take care of them. But that’s changing. For the Love of Peat Buy The 99% Invisible City!

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. As we wrote this script, wildfires were ripping through Northern California, burning millions of acres and filling our beautiful city with smoke. At the same time, across the country, a massive tropical storm bore down on the Gulf Coast, and Phoenix, Arizona, recorded its 50th day of the year above 110 degrees. We know that these stories are connected to a bigger story and honestly trying to keep on top of all the bad climate news can be unbearably depressing. They're the kind of headlines that make you want to just not click.

And so when it seems like there's a piece of genuinely good environmental news, I always smash that link. Best producer Emmett Fitzgerald. Solar power prices at an all-time low. Endangered tigers making a comeback. Exxon mobile doing so poorly gets taken off the Dow Jones. And one morning in the summer of 2019, right after the warmest June and the history of June, I got a surprise dopamine hit when I saw this headline. Tree planting has mind-blowing potential to tackle climate crisis.

Now, to be perfectly clear, the most mind-blowing thing we could do to tackle the climate crisis is to stop burning fossil fuels. But there are also ways that we can soak up some of the CO2 that we've already put into the atmosphere. We're developing machines to do this, but trees and other plants actually do it naturally. They take in carbon from the atmosphere and store it in their leaves and branches and trunks. And so some scientists in Switzerland tried to calculate how much carbon could be removed if we planted as many trees as possible all around the world.

Bay publics to paper in the journal Nature, arguing that if humans planted a trillion trees, it could remove one third of all the CO2 we had put up there in the first place. It was a dramatic finding that led to a lot of dramatic headlines. And the way the paper was being described, you would think that trees were some kind of climate change panacea, that they were the key to fixing global warming. And in the months that followed it felt like the tree planting theory was being aggressively put into practice. Plant a tree to fight the effects of fossil fuels. We start in Ethiopia where a huge campaign has been launched to plant more than 4 billion trees this summer.

Volunteers in India planted more than 66 million trees in just 12 hours in a record breaking. There's even a tree planting anthem. Eventually, the tree planting gospel found the unlikliest of champions. Make it swan, it's real young, little baby, baby Eventually the tree planting gospel found the unlikliest of champions President Donald Trump expressed his love of tree planting at the world economic forum and then Trump, the man who pulled the US out of the Paris climate treaty, signed on to something called the Trillion Trees Initiative On Earth Day, President Trump gathered the press on the White House lawn to watch him plant a tree of his own.

As a sign of our dedication in a few moments, the first lady and I will plant a maple tree right here on the south lawn of the White House, and wherever the tree is, where is this tree now? That's a beautiful street trunk. That's a triple A tree. The triple A tree was already in the ground, but the president, the first lady, members of cabinet,

picked up their golden shovels and threw some dirt in the hole. OK. I'm not a good expert at everything. I'm not a good expert. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against trees. In fact, I love trees, just as much as the next outdoorsy guy from Vermont. But I've also been reporting on climate change long enough to know that there are no silver

bullets. And the way people were talking about tree planting felt, you know, a little simplistic. It was like, here's this enormously complicated issue, climate change. And we're just going to boil it down to a slogan. Plant trees, save the earth. Well, whenever I hear that phrase, all that discourse, my stress level goes up enormously. This is Richard Lindsay,

a scientist at the University of East London sustainability research institute. Everybody is saying, let's plant a million trees. Let's plant a billion trees. Yes, I'm all in favor of that, but let's plant the right tree in the right place. And Richard has personal experience watching a lot of trees get planted in the wrong place. Back in the 1980s, he saw firsthand the impacts of a controversial tree planting scheme in Scotland that ended up threatening one of the most special ecosystems in the world.

The trees weren't being planted to fight climate change. I want to be really clear about that. Very few people were talking about climate change back then. But the story of what happened in Scotland should still serve as a cautionary tale for our tree planting efforts today, because forests aren't the only ecosystems that store carbon. And so when we do plant trees, we need to be really careful about where we're planting them

and what happens after they go in the ground. The British Isles used to be covered in forests, but after centuries of converting forest land to agriculture, the iconic British woodland was largely a thing of the past. By the 20th century, Great Britain was importing wood because it didn't have enough of its own. And so, in the 1980s, the government started using tax breaks to encourage private citizens to fund tree planting efforts

around the country. The goal was to boost the UK's timber supply. And it was a really good tax break, especially for the super rich. So we had people like, well, the band, Genesis, their accountants, got them involved in this. Yes, a number of sort of high profile names who all invested in this, having been convinced that it was

a good thing because, of course, planting trees is a good thing. Is it not? But questions started to emerge about where exactly these trees were going to go. In order for this to work, investors needed large tracks of undeveloped, unwanted land. And there was one place that met that criteria perfectly. It was called the Flow Country. The Flow Country is a vast open area in far north of Scotland that looks almost like the Arctic Tundra.

The term Tundra comes from the Finnish word Tundtree, which means beyond the tree line. And so that really tells you something about the overall landscape. It's essentially treeless. The flow country is what's called a blanket bog. It's actually the largest blanket bog in all of Europe. The best way to appreciate the landscape

might be in an airplane. From the sky, it looks like a Persian rug streaked with colorful svagnum mosses and dotted with little pools of water. Well it's harder to appreciate when you're on the ground. The majority of the landscape will be this wet, boggy, soft, a really quite colorful carpet of bog mosses. So as you walk across it, it's a bit like walking across a sprung mattress, except you need rubber boots. Yeah, a soggy, a soggy mattress.

Sogy is a very good word for it. Yes. There's a saying in Scotland that summer is the best day of the year. It's cold in damp and gets an enormous amount of rainfall. But otherwise, it's perfect. It truly is one of my favorite places on earth. Yeah, and beautiful Scotland's terrible weather actually creates the perfect conditions

for an incredible substance to form. It's called Pete and it's what the flow country is made of. The land is so saturated, there's very little oxygen, and it's really hard for plant matter to break down. And so over thousands and thousands of years, this partially decomposed material, or peat, has been slowly accumulating. In some parts of the flow country, the peat is now more than 30 feet deep. And the amazing thing about peat from a climate perspective is that it stores a ton of carbon. I fell in love with peat lands because they are these beautiful ecosystems, but they also are

global powerhouses for carbon storage. This is Merit Turetski, or the Queen of Pete, as she's known on Twitter. She's the director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at UC Boulder, and she says that Petelands are like these dense underground pockets of carbon. So the amount of carbon stored in Petelands on a meter square basis is often 10 times, 15 times higher than that same area of land in a forest or in an agricultural setting. These are true hot spots when it comes to protecting carbon in soils and keeping that carbon out of the atmosphere. Peatlands around the world actually contain more carbon than all the worlds of vegetation

combined. But back in the 80s, most people didn't know about this incredible power of Pete. If anything, bogs were seen as unpleasant, scary places to be avoided. In part, because they were filled with dead people, ancient bog bodies that had been pickled for centuries in the anaerobic muck. Some of these bodies appear to be ritual sacrifices from the bronze and iron ages. Once those bodies were tossed into the bog, they became very efficiently preserved. Because of those same conditions that protect Pete from decomposition, the bog bodies didn't

decompose. And occasionally these eerily well-preserved corpses would surface from the bogs of Northern Europe. Nilecisse in Scotland, the spooky, soggy, petland wasn't exactly a popular spot. The flow country was known locally by an acronym, Mamba. Famously, it was called Mamba Country.

Miles, miles of bug of Buggerall. And so, in the 1980s, when the forest industry started looking for large tracks of undeveloped land to plant trees, the flow country was an obvious choice. You know, it was seen as a wasteland, so the local people had been convinced by the forest industry that this was going to bring a new economy to the area. So, of course, local people were really excited. What happened next was kind of a race between the forestry groups who started draining the

peat bogs and planting trees and conservation groups who began trying to catalog all the biodiversity in this fragile landscape before it was completely covered up. And that's where I was really sucked into the whole flow country story because essentially I was tasked with running a survey program to establish whether the flow country contained anything of importance, anything that we should be concerned about losing." Richard assembled a team of scientists. They packed up tents and camping gear, cameras and food, and took the train from London, over 400 miles north to the tippy top of Scotland. And right away Richard was taken with the place.

It was extraordinary. First of all, in the silence. But pretty quickly, he got acquainted with the sounds and smells of the place too. For weeks, he and his team would trample around on top of the soggy mattress, documenting all of the wildlife in the bog. Carnivorous plants, dragonflies, water beetles, loons, and golden plovers. It was tough going, but apart from the wet socks, Richard remembers these long walks fondly. Because you sort of bounce gently along, there's a sort of squish, squish under foot, and there's a lovely scent of holy hazards and the various sort of flowering plants that

lofted up around you. And in the end, Richard and his team determined that the flow country wasn't a wasteland at all, but a thriving wetland habitat that had been underappreciated for centuries. Essentially, we found that the range of ecosystem types was like nothing. Well, really, that had been described anywhere else in the world. But as all this was happening, the tree planting was already underway, and so at the same time Richard was discovering the secrets of this delicate landscape, the forestry companies were tearing it up. They plowed up the bogs, strained out all that water, and planted non-native, quick-growing

conifers. Pretty soon, little patches of evergreen forests were sprouting up all across the flow country, although Richard says forest isn't really the right word. The plantations, plantations, established with agricultural densities in mind. Rose and rose of sittka sp and Lodgepole pine packed tightly together. In these dense plantations, we're terrible places for native wildlife. They quickly filled up with predators

that scared off many of the birds that Richard and his team were just beginning to learn about. The petalins were turning into a tree farm. So, yeah, pretty, solid is trying. As they did their work, Richard and the other scientists were called to testify in local meetings about the Forestry Project, and they had to argue that this seemingly empty, worthless landscape was actually worth protecting. And essentially, it's our equivalent of the tropical rainforest.

But the forest industry didn't see it that way. I just have this general memory of being shouted at a lot for a very long time. They were banging the table and they were shouting at us and demanding to know what we thought we were doing. To which our response was, well, we think we're doing our job. And our job was to identify important areas of the nation's wildlife heritage. And that's exactly what we were doing. Was it weird at the time to be arguing that trees were an environmental problem? Oh, that was so difficult. Yes, but, you know, it's like everything, you know, a medication is a good thing when used in the right way, in the right place, used in the wrong

way, in the wrong place. It's a poison, and that was the tricky message that we had to try and get across. But over time, public opinion began to turn against the tree planting. A lot of that had to do with the fact that it seemed like an egregious form of tax avoidance, but the message about the Petelins was also starting to get through. The government eventually agreed to protect about half

of the Petelins that Richard and his team had surveyed. And then a couple months later, they completely ended the tax scheme. A colleague phoned me and just said, it's gone. I said, what's gone? The first round scheme, it's gone. I don't remember, I had to sit down. I was so surprised.

It was a big win for the bog, and the conservationists fighting to protect it. And in the decades that followed the way people saw the flow country, really started to shift. It went from being a place people avoided to a place that people wanted to see, the largest blanket bog in all of Europe. And people were coming to visit it to see this, this amazing landscape, and all of this gradually chipped away at the idea of this is useless wasteland, and people began to relate to it as their landscape, their precious landscape. But a lot of damage had been done.

Over 150,000 acres of the flow country have been drained and planted with trees. These trees never really grew very well. They were short and stubby and not very useful as timber. But the plantations pushed out native wildlife that depended on the bog and damaged the precious peat that was storing all that carbon. And the flow country wasn't the only place where this kind of thing happened.

Chile, to take one example, started incentivizing tree planting around the same time as the UK. And while they did plant a lot of trees, the effort led to a decline in biodiversity and negligible climate benefits. In Alberta, Canada, they drained large swaths of bog in order to plant trees, again, starting in the 80s. But most of those trees burned down in the Fort McMurray Fire of 2016, in part because the once wet ground had been drained dry.

Back in the 1980s, Richard Lindsay and his colleagues were only concerned about the biodiversity and the under-appreciated peat bog. But in recent years, as the urgency of the climate crisis grows, there's been an increased focus on carbon storage in ecosystems. Scientists are studying the carbon dynamics and kelp forests and seagrass beds, and Petland's in particular have been getting a lot of attention for their carbon-storing powers. You know you've gone mainstream. When Alec Baldwin is talking about you in a PSA for the UN.

Pete Lans are crucial to fight climate change. And here's the thing about Pete Lans. They matter for the planet because they actually store twice as much carbon as all the world's forest together while covering less than 3% of the land's surface. So Pete Lans are the most efficient terrestrial carbon sink under planet. This is Roxanne Anderson. She's been studying the islands for a while now

at the Environmental Research Institute in Scotland. And for decades, it felt like she was laboring away in some obscure corner of academia. She didn't have journalists like me bugging her for interviews, but that's changing. I think this year alone, I must have given something like 15 or 20 interviews. But, in her sense is that when it comes to carbon storage, peelens still don't get the attention that forests do. She thinks it's because

all of the carbon in that peatland is below ground. I think that it's because it's not visible. That's why the name of your podcast really resonated. If you look at a forest, you see the trees, you see the vegetation, you see where the carbon is, you see why it's taking up carbon. But even though the carbon in a peatland is hidden underground, it's not locked away forever. Just as a forest can burn down, a peatland can be degraded, can be gobbled up for agriculture, or ranching. And when that happens, a lot of its carbon goes up into the atmosphere, and the carbon sink

becomes a carbon source. And that's what happened in the flow country, except in this case, the crop that was gobbling up the peatland was trees. When you drain a peat bog to plant trees, it releases carbon. And then, as the trees grow, their roots impact the way the carbon and the soil is processed. And the carbon losses from the soil can actually exceed the amount of carbon that's taken up in the tree. So planting trees on peets, on deep peets, particularly, is really, really not a good idea.

It leads to unintended consequences of basically losing more carbon than you can gain through the trees. And so now, in the flow country, the best thing for the climate may actually be to cut trees down. It's quite claustrophobic being in some of these dark, damp plantations. And so when you start taking them down

and start opening up the landscape again, in some ways it's actually quite cathartic. This is Paul Turner, awarding with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. And in 1995 the RSPB purchased a 50,000 acre reserve in the flow country, on land that had been heavily planted with trees. Since then they've been working to restore the bog. We've really spent sort of 25 years trying to repair damage that was done in the sort of 70s and 80s

to bits of the peatlands. Some of the contractors doing this repair work are actually the same local people who drain the bog back in the 80s. First, they cut the trees down and haul them out. Then, the crucial next step is to re-wet the soil. They build dams in the peat to try to return the water table to its normal level and get that soggy bog back.

A lot of this work is done with heavy machinery and it does not look pretty. And yeah, you have days where you think actually this is quite a destructive process, but when you start seeing some of the work that we did to attend 15 years ago, it really makes you feel quite good about what you're trying to achieve with it. Roxanne Anderson has studied the box that Paul Turner and the RSPB have restored to try and understand the climate impacts. So what we've found is that when you take trees down

from a people and then do the restoration, initially it reduces carbon. That's not very surprising because of the kind of physical damage that you have to do in terms of cutting the words and everything else. But over the course of decades of restoration, the bogs have switched back from a carbon source to a carbon sink. So effectively returning this kind of carbon benefit or climate benefits of peatlands.

But as they do this work, Paul Turner keeps running into the same problem that Richard Lindsay did 30 years ago. It's hard to explain to people why trees, in this very specific situation, are bad for the ecosystem. There are a lot of people that don't really understand why we are cutting trees down. It's because surely planting trees is the best thing to do. As I mentioned before, planting trees in the right place is definitely a really good thing to do. Paul is not anti-tree. In fact, the RSPP actually helps manage another piece of land in Scotland

in the Karingorne Mountains, where they are actively planting trees in an effort to restore the forest and sequester carbon. And the Scottish Government is helping fund both of these efforts. Scotland has a goal of restoring over 600,000 acres of peatbock by 2030. And at the same time, they want to plant 30,000 acres of new forest each year. They are planting trees in one place just as they're cutting trees down in another. It's understanding that not all habitats are equal, that not all habitats should have trees on them, and that when we're talking about climate change mitigation, that one answer doesn't apply to every problem.

Forests are great, but they aren't great everywhere. Yeah, I mean, I love forests, but I love other ecosystems too. This is a forest scientist named Forest, Forest Flashtman. Yeah, so I mean, one of the big mistakes that the trillion tree paper made is they sort of said, well, areas without trees don't have carbon. And that's not true because areas without trees have't have carbon. And that's not true because areas without trees have carbon below ground. And not just beetlands, healthy grasslands also store carbon underground. So instead of just thinking about how many trees we can plant, we should be thinking about all the

different ways we can maximize carbon storage in any given landscape without sacrificing biodiversity. That might mean restoring beetlands or protecting healthy grasslands or forests, and That might mean restoring petalins or protecting healthy crashlands or forests, and it might mean planting more trees. And if planting trees is the right thing for a landscape, we're going to have to do more than just plant them. Forest Flitzen has studied tree planting efforts that are being done for climate change, and he's found that often they fail because all of the focus is on that initial act of getting the saplings in the ground.

Because it's something that a politician can walk in and do and get a picture taken and be on the front page of the newspaper or beyond the TV. But then often in the years that follow, those trees get cut down by people or eaten by cows or burned in a fire. So this dialogue, it says, oh, we need to plant a trillion trees. Well, actually, we don't need to plant a trillion trees. Let's say the trillion trees is right.

We need to make sure that a trillion trees grow. And making sure that trees grow is more complicated than planting them. Fleischman says the first step is to stop cutting down the healthy forests that we have left. We need to stop illegal logging and boycott the companies that are driving before a station and work to protect the rights of indigenous people who are often the best protectors of forests. And where we do plant new forests, we need to work with local people to make sure that

they benefit from the new trees and are invested in keeping them growing. So when we start thinking about it this way, it really becomes a political and economic problem, not a technical tree planting problem. I think that people get really excited about tree planting in part because it's a solution that seems to exist outside of politics, in economics. It's this simple, natural solution that doesn't require us to pass massive legislation or build a whole new energy system. But the truth is that climate change is fundamentally a complicated, political, and economic, and technological problem.

There is no one perfect solution. But we need to solve it anyway. Bugs are the best. We have so many more to talk about bugs. Yes, so one of the things that I found interesting learning all about bugs was all the language around them. You know, you've got so many different words for bogs. Bog, Fen, Meyer, Moore, Marsh, Swamp, Puckassin. This is Merit Turetsky, again, the queen of Pete from our story. And she says that, you know, these aren't synonyms necessarily.

Like, there are subtle differences between all these different words. Some of them are rooted in ecology and wetland classification. Some of them are regional. But there's also this this whole sort of metaphorical side to bog language, wetland language. Like we use a lot of these words a lot actually not in a Pete Lynn science way, but in this kind of more poetic metaphorical sense. And usually bog language connotes metaphorical sense and usually bog language connotes stuckness. Right. Like getting bogged down in something. Yeah. Right. Exactly. But there's a lot of other examples like a quagmire. Well, right. Is it type of bog? And you can get you can get mire in something. A mire is a type of bog or actually, I think a bog is a type of mire. It's like a square rectangle situation.

A morass is another word for kind of marshy boggy wetland but also like a confusing situation that you might get stuck in. So what is the explanation for why we use these words so much? When most people probably don't experience bogs on a really regular basis. You know, I think that for Merit Tresky, she says that it's like even though bogs are these places that we don't necessarily spend a lot of time, we've always, humans have always been fascinated by them. And they've always represented this like

almost supernatural in-between space. And I think because of the mysteriousness of that, not being land, not being water, not being fully alive, not being fully dead, they are really fascinating to us. And so, bogs in movies, in pop culture, in literature often represent a place where people can hide from society or where you can potentially get lost. And this is totally true in books and movies. Like I remember in Withering Heights, you know, you have the Moors, which are often are presented throughout the book as this kind of foreboding landscape where they might, you know,

Catherine Heathcliff might get lost or drowned or in Lord of the Rings. They sort of wind their way through these marshes that are filled with dead faces looking up at them. There are dead things! Dead faces in the water! When I was a kid, the one that really got me was the swamp of sadness and the never-ending story. You know, where his horse actually gets swallowed up in it.

It's just so tragic, so upsetting. Yeah, totally. I almost pulled a clip from that, but it was like too kind of unpleasant to listen to this little boy screaming about his drowning horse. It's very sad. The one that really comes to mind for me is the Princess Bride. You know, the characters are traversing or navigating their way through a fire swamp, where, you know, bursts of flames come up through the soil and they have to dodge these hazards.

I mean, what are the three terrors of the fire swamp? One, the flames burn. No problem. There's a popping sound proceeding each week and avoid that. Two, the lightning sound, but you will clever enough to discover what that looks like. So in the future, we can avoid that, too.

Bessling, what about the RRUSs? Rodents of unusual size? I don't think they exist. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH white as far fetched as you might imagine. There are gases, some of them are flammable that are produced in these very wet saturated bog systems. We don't often see flames leaping up through a bog system, but there is a lot of methane produced because of this really anaerobic decomposition. And that methane actually could be flammable.

I mean, that is shocking that that could be based in any kind of reality. I mean, come to think of it, you know, the dead people in the bogs like the Lord of the Rings, that also feels like a reference to the bog people that we touch on in the main body of the episode. Right, bog bodies. Yeah. And so, you know, in general, I think bogs are portrayed as these kind of dark, scary places as we've seen throughout this. And like, usually there is some truth to that.

Like, they are hard to walk through and you can get stuck in the mud and there are weird gases. So it's like, it's like a caricature based in some amount of real, real accurate details of what it's like, but it also falls really short and fully appreciating them for the incredible places that they are. Yeah, so I have to admit, bugs are like my favorite ecosystem. I think there's so cool. I used to study botany in the Midwest. There's much more bugs. There's no bugs here in the really in the West Coast to speak up, but there's real bogs there. I like a cranberry bog.

I like a quaking bog. I mean, a quaking bog is like with a spagnum rose so thick that trees can grow on it. And if you get enough people, they can jump on the spagnum and trees can sway from you jumping on the ground. It is like, bogs are amazing. I love them.

Yeah, I wanted to pitch this story because I wanted to go to Scotland and check out these bugs, because I also think bugs. I'm so sorry. And then that immediately became an impossibility with the COVID situation. But can I share one cool bug fact

that I didn't get to work into the story? No, absolutely go for it. So did you know that bugs breathe? No, So did you know that bogs breathe? No, I did not know that. So there's this common phenomenon in Peteland science called bog breathing. And what we mean by that is that the surface of a bog, the surface of the vegetation layer moves up and down.

It expands or it shrinks, depending on the hydrology and where the water table is sitting. And this is actually an adaptive trait. It means when conditions are wet, the water table adjusts and the whole peat layer adjusts to that shift. When things get dry, again, that pit layer responds. So, it's not really breathing as in like respiration.

It's more like a metaphor of movement when they say bog breathing. Yeah, yeah. It's almost like, I like think of it as like, the bog is like a, like a giant's belly that's like rising and falling as the ecosystem sort ecosystem breathes in and out. It takes on more space and pushes up to the sky. Almost like your diaphragm would expand when you're taking a deep breath, but then that can also contract down and that breath is then expelled. This isn't a new phenomenon like scientists have known about

bog breathing for a really long time. But it's incredibly difficult to measure. So this is Roxanne Anderson again. So if you think about it, trying to go and measure how much the surface moves up and down, and that's in the order of millimeters, you know, if you try to measure that by walking onto the bog, which is an unstable and wobbly surface, it's going to be very difficult. Right. It's like trying to measure the surface of a water bed. It constantly moves underneath your feet. That must be really frustrating if you're trying to measure it.

Yeah, exactly. And so Roxanne Anderson and her colleagues have been looking at ways that they could measure this without actually going out and trying to measure the surface manually. And what we've been looking at is using satellites that uses radar. So basically using radar from a satellite to send a signal down to the bog every few days and getting measurements on how that surface level is changing over time.

What Roxanne and her colleagues have been trying to figure out is like, can they use that bog breathing pattern and getting measurements on how that surface level is changing over time. What Roxanne and her colleagues have been trying to figure out is can they use that bog breathing pattern from the satellite data as an indicator of the overall health of the Pete Land? It's like a doctor putting a stethoscope to your back and saying, deep breath. Right, exactly. And I think gathering that data could help scientists understand

whether a Peteland is functioning as a healthy Peteland and a robust carbon sink or whether it's degraded in some way that you maybe didn't know and might be actually emitting carbon. So what's the pattern they're finding? And like, how do you tell if the breathing of a bog is healthy or not? Yeah, I asked Roxanne that.

So what we've found is that kind of healthy peatland, if you like, they have one peaking one trough roughly every year. And the peak is usually, if they're really healthy, it's usually going to be in the autumn, with quite a high amplitude. And then the trough is going to be in the spring. So a high amplitude and then the trough is going to be in the spring. So you have this kind of cycle of peaks and troughs. So one big breath in and one big breath out every year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the more degree that it gets, the more it just becomes kind of no peaks, no troughs, just kind of a flatter line. Well, you don't want to

see a flat line like an EKG, you don't want that. Right. Right. And you know, Roxanne says that this new way of gathering bog breathing data is actually like really important or could be really, really important for Peteland conservation globally. I think that the interesting thing for me about this is that it completely changes the way that we can understand Pitland globally because we can just do that, you know, if we spend the time to do the validation like we've done here for any type of Pitland, you might end up with knowing what the signal or the breathing pattern for a particular type of Pitland is and

you might be able to detect anomalies that are diagnostic of degradation for beatlands that are impossible to reach or very, very difficult to reach that really remote or impossible to visit on a regular basis. And this is really important because so many beatlands are in these remote locations, and they're their places that humans have tended to avoid. And we're actually still discovering new petalins and often they're really hard to access. And so it could be this really helpful tool in mapping and understanding the role that petalins

are playing as carbon sinks or as carbon sources. I mean, one of the things that I think is really interesting about the story is that the petalins are doing a lot of good if they're healthy, but if they're not healthy, they're actually kind of a problem because they release that carbon that they've stored. Right, exactly. It's super important that we find out where they are and monitor them and really are invested in keeping them healthy all around the world. Like it's like all of our well-being is sort of caught up in that carbon beneath these hot spots all over the world. Yeah, oh it's so cool. Well I love bogs even more now. Thank you so much Emmett. Yeah of course.

99% invisible was produced so sweet by Emmett Fitzgerald, mixed by Bryson Barnes, music by Sean Rial. Our senior producer is Delaney Hall, Kurt Colstad is the digital director, Resa team is Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Chris Barube, Joe Rosenberg, Katie Mingle, Abby Madonna, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Jesse Reynolds from UCLA, who we also spoke to for this story, and also to writers Virginia Guen and Sharon Levy, whose articles about the flow country got us interested in the region. If you want to read more about Pete Linge Restoration in Scotland,

we have links to their fantastic articles on our website, it's 9iMPI.org. We are a project of 91.7K-A-L-W in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which lives at the far corners of North America, but is centered and beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are a founding member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective

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