The company Carbon Lockdown has tested burying wood in “vaults” that would keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.Ning Zeng The discovery of an eastern red cedar log, buried in eastern Canada for millennia and nearly perfectly preserved, illustrates the potential of a new kind of carbon storage scheme in the fight against climate change: wood “vaults.” The log shows how burying wood—rather than letting it decay on the surface—could keep billions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) out of the atmosphere, advocates say. The unusual conditions that preserved the log, described today in a paper in Science, provides “a single data point, but it’s a very critical one,” for the wood vault strategy, says Ning Zeng, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland who is the lead scientist on the study. Many researchers believe limiting greenhouse gas emissions—though essential—won’t be enough to curb dangerous amounts of warming. So some researchers and companies are pursuing ways to remove CO 2 from the environment. Some want to actively strip CO 2 from the atmosphere or ocean . Others want to keep CO 2 from getting into the atmosphere in the first place—for example, by capturing CO 2 at smokestacks and pumping it into rock formations for long-term storage, or by burying biomass at sea , where its carbon can remained locked up for centuries. Wood vaults—burying biomass on land—represent yet another idea for carbon sequestration, and the concept has gained traction in recent years, says Stephen Pacala, an ecologist at Princeton University. About a dozen groups around the world are conducting pilot projects to refine the technology, Zeng adds, including a company he founded called Carbon Lockdown. In theory, some 4.5% of the world’s total biomass—a combination of waste wood and sustainably harvested wood—could be buried […]