This is another in our new series identifying technologies and actions that can slow climate change, reduce its impacts or help communities cope with a rapidly changing world.
CHICAGO — Native people in the Amazon may have been creating fertile soil for farming for thousands of years. And what they learned could offer lessons for people concerned about climate change today.
The Amazon River basin covers much of central South America. Across that basin are archaeological sites. These are places where ancient people left their mark on the land. And patches of strangely fertile soil dot the landscape at many of these sites. It’s darker in color than surrounding soils. It’s also richer in carbon.
Scientists have long debated the origin of this so-called dark Earth. Researchers now know that native Kuikuro people in southeastern Brazil make similar soil around their villages. The finding hints that long-ago Amazonians made this type of soil, too.
Taylor Perron is an Earth scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He shared his team’s new findings December 16 at a meeting, here, of the American Geophysical Union.
That Kuikuro people make dark Earth today is a “pretty strong argument” that people were also making it in the past, says Paul Baker. This geochemist works at Duke University in Durham, N.C. He was not involved in the research.
The dark Earth that ancient peoples made may have been good for more than farming, Perron points out. This soil also could have stored huge amounts of carbon. It might therefore offer a blueprint for trapping carbon-rich gases from the air and storing them in soil, Perron says. Sucking such planet-warming gases out of the air…
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