Table of Contents
- What Is Carbon Sequestration?
- How Can Gardeners Sequester Carbon?
- How Does Carbon Improve Soil?
- Carbon Balance
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If you're a gardener who wants to improve your soil and care for the planet at the same time, carbon sequestration is crucial to understand.
What Is Carbon Sequestration?
Carbon on Earth is generally either in its gaseous form (atmospheric COâ‚‚) or else is sequestered in solid or liquid forms.
Any carbon which has not volatilized into the atmospheric is said to be sequestered.
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How Can Gardeners Sequester Carbon?
Behind water, carbon is the primary constituent of plants.
Just like most carbon-based life on Earth, plants rely heavily on carbon for literally everything.
Thankfully, plants are incredible at pulling atmospheric carbon from the air in the form of COâ‚‚, and converting it to carbon-based sugars through the photosynthesis process.
An estimated 70%+ of this carbon is freely exchanged with bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi for water and nutrients.
Check out our article on plant Root Exudates to learn more about this process.
This means that plants are veritable carbon pumps - perfectly adapted to pull COâ‚‚ from the air and sequester it in soil.
Simply by growing more plants, more frequntly, gardeners can sequester more carbon.
It's also important to chop + drop what you grow, or to compost it, or feed it to your chickens or worm bin to keep that carbon cycling through your garden.
How Does Carbon Improve Soil?
Carbon Balance
At a planetary level, carbon is stored primarily in 2 forms:
Free Carbon
Free carbon is carbon which has been unlocked, released, and off-gassed into the environment.
It is atmospheric carbon in gaseous form as COâ‚‚.
This atmospheric carbon is available for plants to breathe, and functions as insulation for the planet - trapping in heat like fiberglass does in your walls.
Sequestered Carbon
Sequestered carbon is not freely-available, and is instead locked up in our planet's biology - soils, peat, plants, fungi, algae, animals, lichen, bacteria, archea, and more.
Oil and natural gas deposits underground also represent pockets of concentrated carbon, sequestered away for millions of years.
Check out our article on Carbon Sequestration to learn more about how to lock up more carbon.
Life on Earth requires a delicate balance between sequestered carbon and free carbon in order to thrive.
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If too much carbon is locked up in biology, the planet cools and we may find ourselves in an ice age.
The cold cycle may then reduce the proliferation of life, reducing the amount of sequestered carbon, releasing more into the atmosphere, warming the planet again, and returning to balance.
If, on the other hand, too much carbon is released from sequestered forms, through deforestation, burning fossil fuels, reducing biodiversity, ecosystem destruction, etc. then our insulative layer of COâ‚‚ may become too thick.
This results in a global warming - the effects of which we're beginning to see now.
A hot Earth needs the sequestration of more carbon in solid forms in order to regain equilibrium and begin to level off again and eventually cool.
That's all for now, thanks for reading!
If you have any questions, comments, or would like to connect with fellow gardeners, head on over to the forum and post there.
