SPEAKER_02: to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXl, the online learning platform for kids. iXl covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXl. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXl membership when they sign up today at ixl.com slash invisible. That's the letters ixl.com slash invisible. A couple of years back, 99 PI producer, Emmett Fitzgerald brought us a beautiful story about peat bunks. Peat is essential for biodiversity and for the climate. It is really, really good at storing carbon, but like a lot of things that we cover on the show, peat often goes unnoticed in part because it is literally out of sight underground. We've noticed peat and carbon sequestration more and more in the news lately. Journalists have been brilliantly covering stories about the tree planting movement, private ownership of Scotland's bogs, and the threat to peat in the Congo basin. Couple that with even more extreme weather happening in more places, and we thought it would be a good idea to repeat this story. Did you really think I could resist that? I mean, I'm only human. Anyway, enjoy. 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.
SPEAKER_13: And so when it seems like there's a piece of genuinely good environmental news, I always smash that link. Best producer, Emmet Fitzgerald. Solar power prices at an all-time low. Endangered tigers making a comeback. ExxonMobil doing so poorly it gets taken off the Dow Jones. And one morning in the summer of 2019, right after the warmest June in the history of June's, I got a surprise dopamine hit when I saw this headline.
SPEAKER_02: Tree planting has mind-blowing potential to tackle climate crisis.
SPEAKER_13: 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
SPEAKER_02: to calculate how much carbon could be removed if we planted as many trees as possible all around the world. They published a 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.
SPEAKER_13: 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.
SPEAKER_07: Plant a tree to fight the effects of fossil fuels.
SPEAKER_00: We start in Ethiopia where a huge campaign has been launched to plant more than 4 billion trees this summer.
SPEAKER_08: Volunteers in India planted more than 66 million trees in just 12 hours in a record-breaking. There's even a tree planting anthem.
SPEAKER_07: How about 20 million, 20 million trees,
SPEAKER_12: making 20 trillion little baby leaves.
SPEAKER_13: Eventually, the tree planting gospel found the unlikeliest of champions.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_13: On Earth Day, President Trump gathered the press on the White House lawn to watch him plant a tree of his own.
SPEAKER_06: 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. Wherever the tree is, where is this tree now? That's a beautiful straight trunk. That's a triple A tree.
SPEAKER_13: 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. Okay. That was very good.
SPEAKER_13: 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 of climate change, and we're just gonna boil it down to a slogan, plant trees, save the earth.
SPEAKER_05: Well, whenever I hear that phrase or that discourse, my stress level goes up enormously.
SPEAKER_13: This is Richard Lindsay, a scientist at the University of East London's Sustainability Research Institute.
SPEAKER_05: 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.
SPEAKER_13: 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
SPEAKER_02: of a controversial tree planting scheme in Scotland that ended up threatening one of the most special ecosystems in the world.
SPEAKER_13: The trees weren't being planted to fight climate change. I wanna 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.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_13: And it was a really good tax break, especially for the super rich.
SPEAKER_05: 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?
SPEAKER_13: But questions started to emerge about where exactly these trees were gonna go. In order for this to work, investors needed large tracts of undeveloped, unwanted land. And there was one place that met that criteria perfectly. It was called the Flow Country.
SPEAKER_02: The Flow Country is a vast open area in far North of Scotland that looks almost like the Arctic tundra.
SPEAKER_05: The term tundra comes from the Finnish word tuntri, which means beyond the tree line. And so that really tells you something about the overall landscape. It's essentially treeless.
SPEAKER_13: 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 sphagnum mosses and dotted with little pools of water. But it's harder to appreciate when you're on the ground.
SPEAKER_05: The majority of the landscape will be this wet, boggy, soft, 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.
SPEAKER_13: Soggy is a very good word for it, yes.
SPEAKER_05: There's a saying in Scotland
SPEAKER_02: that summer is the best day of the year. It's cold and damp and gets an enormous amount of rainfall. But otherwise it's perfect. It truly is one of my favorite places on earth.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, and beautiful Scotland's terrible weather actually creates the perfect conditions for an incredible substance to form. It's called peat, and it's what the flow country is made of. The land is so saturated that 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,
SPEAKER_02: from a climate perspective, is that it stores a ton of carbon.
SPEAKER_11: I fell in love with peat lands because they are these beautiful ecosystems, but they also are global powerhouses for carbon storage.
SPEAKER_13: This is Merit Turetsky, or the Queen of Peat, 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 peat lands are like these dense, underground pockets of carbon.
SPEAKER_11: So the amount of carbon stored in peat lands 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. And these are true hotspots when it comes to protecting carbon in soils and keeping that carbon out of the atmosphere.
SPEAKER_02: Peat lands around the world actually contain more carbon than all the worlds of vegetation combined.
SPEAKER_13: But back in the 80s, most people didn't know about this incredible power of peat. If anything, bogs were seen as unpleasant, scary places to be avoided. In part because they were filled with dead people,
SPEAKER_02: ancient bog bodies that had been pickled for centuries in the anaerobic muck.
SPEAKER_13: Some of these bodies appear to be ritual sacrifices from the Bronze and Iron Ages.
SPEAKER_11: Once those bodies were tossed into the bog, they became very efficiently preserved. Because of those same conditions that protect peat from decomposition, the bog bodies didn't decompose.
SPEAKER_02: And occasionally these eerily well-preserved corpses would surface from the bogs of Northern Europe.
SPEAKER_13: Needless to say, in Scotland, the spooky, soggy peatland wasn't exactly a popular spot. The flow country was known locally by an acronym, Mamba.
SPEAKER_05: Famously, it was called Mamba Country. Miles and miles of bugger all.
SPEAKER_13: And so in the 1980s, when the forest industry started looking for large tracts of undeveloped land to plant trees, the flow country was an obvious choice.
SPEAKER_05: You know, it was seen as a wasteland. So the local people had been convinced by the forest industry that this was gonna bring a new economy to the area. So, you know, of course, local people were really excited.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_05: 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.
SPEAKER_13: 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.
SPEAKER_05: It was extraordinary. First of all, in the silence.
SPEAKER_13: But pretty quickly, he got acquainted with the sounds and smells of the place too. For weeks, he and his team would tramp 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,
SPEAKER_05: there's a sort of squish squish on the foot. And there's the lovely scent of all the heathers and the various other flowering plants that wafted up around you.
SPEAKER_13: 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.
SPEAKER_05: Essentially, we found that the range of ecosystem types was like nothing, well, really, that had been described anywhere else in the world.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_13: They plowed up the bogs, drained out all that water, and planted non-native, quick-growing conifers. Pretty soon, little patches of evergreen forest were sprouting up all across the flow country. Although Richard says forest isn't really the right word.
SPEAKER_05: No, they're plantations. Plantations established with agricultural densities in mind.
SPEAKER_13: Rows and rows of Sitka spruce and lodgepole pine packed tightly together.
SPEAKER_02: And these dense plantations were 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 peatlands were turning into a tree farm.
SPEAKER_05: So yeah, pretty soul destroying.
SPEAKER_13: 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.
SPEAKER_05: And essentially, it's our equivalent of the tropical rainforest.
SPEAKER_13: But the forest industry didn't see it that way. I just have this general memory of being shouted at a lot
SPEAKER_05: 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. You know, our job was to identify important areas of the nation's wildlife heritage. And that's exactly what we were doing.
SPEAKER_13: Was it weird at the time to be arguing that trees were an environmental problem? Oh, that was so difficult.
SPEAKER_05: 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.
SPEAKER_02: 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 peatlands was also starting to get through.
SPEAKER_13: The government eventually agreed to protect about half of the peatland that Richard and his team had surveyed. And then a couple months later, they completely ended the tax scheme.
SPEAKER_05: A colleague phoned me. He just said, it's gone. I said, what's gone? The Forestry Grants Scheme, it's gone. I remember I had to sit down. I was so surprised.
SPEAKER_13: 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,
SPEAKER_05: to see 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.
SPEAKER_13: But a lot of damage had been done. Over 150,000 acres of the flow country had been drained and planted with trees.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_13: 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.
SPEAKER_02: Back in the 1980s, Richard Lindsay and his colleagues were only concerned about the biodiversity in the underappreciated 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 in kelp forests and seagrass beds and peatlands 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.
SPEAKER_03: Peatlands are crucial to fight climate change. And here's the thing about peatland. They matter for the planet because they actually store twice as much carbon as all the world's forests together while covering less than 3% of the land surface.
SPEAKER_09: So peatlands are the most efficient terrestrial carbon sink on the planet.
SPEAKER_13: This is Roxanne Anderson. She's been studying peatlands 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.
SPEAKER_09: I think this year alone, I must have given something like 15 or 20 interviews.
SPEAKER_13: But Anderson says that when it comes to carbon storage, peatlands still don't get the attention that forests do. She thinks it's because all the carbon in a peatland is below ground.
SPEAKER_09: 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.
SPEAKER_13: 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, it can be gobbled up for agriculture or ranching.
SPEAKER_02: And when that happens, a lot of its carbon goes up into the atmosphere and the carbon sink becomes a carbon source.
SPEAKER_13: 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 in the soil is processed.
SPEAKER_09: 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 peat, on deep peat 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.
SPEAKER_02: And so now in the flow country, the best thing for the climate may actually be to cut trees down.
SPEAKER_10: 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.
SPEAKER_13: This is Paul Turner, a warden 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. They've really spent sort of 25 years
SPEAKER_10: trying to repair damage that was done in the sort of 70s and 80s to bits of the peatlands.
SPEAKER_13: Some of the contractors doing this repair work are actually the same local people who drained 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.
SPEAKER_02: A lot of this work is done with heavy machinery and it does not look pretty.
SPEAKER_10: 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 10, 15 years ago, it really makes you feel quite good about what you're trying to achieve with it.
SPEAKER_13: Roxanne Anderson has studied the bogs that Paul Turner and the RSPB have restored to try and understand the climate impacts.
SPEAKER_09: What we've found is that when you take trees down from a peatland and do the restoration, initially it releases carbon. That's not very surprising because of the kind of physical damage that you have to do in terms of cutting the woods and everything else.
SPEAKER_13: But over the course of decades of restoration, the bogs have switched back from a carbon source to a carbon sink.
SPEAKER_09: So effectively returning this kind of carbon benefit or climate benefits of peatlands.
SPEAKER_13: 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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. And as I mentioned before, planting trees in the right place is definitely a really good thing to do.
SPEAKER_13: Paul is not anti-tree. In fact, the RSPB actually helps manage another piece of land in Scotland in the Caringorn Mountains where they are actively planting trees in an effort to restore the forest and sequester carbon. And the Scottish government is helping fund
SPEAKER_02: both of these efforts. Scotland has a goal of restoring over 600,000 acres of peatbog 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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.
SPEAKER_13: Forests are great, but they aren't great everywhere.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I mean, I love forests, but I love other ecosystems too.
SPEAKER_13: This is a forest scientist named Forrest, Forrest Fleischmann.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, so I mean, one of the big mistakes that the Trillium 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 carbon below ground.
SPEAKER_13: And not just peatlands, healthy grasslands also store carbon underground.
SPEAKER_02: 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 peatlands or protecting healthy grasslands or forests. And it might mean planting more trees.
SPEAKER_13: And if planting trees is the right thing for a landscape, we're gonna have to do more than just plant them. Forrest Fleischmann 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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 be on TV.
SPEAKER_13: 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,
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_13: And making sure that trees grow is more complicated than planting them. Fleischmann says the first step is to stop cutting down the healthy forest that we have left. We need to stop illegal logging and boycott the companies that are driving deforestation 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.
SPEAKER_07: So when we start thinking about it this way, it really becomes a political and economic problem. Not a technical tree planting problem.
SPEAKER_13: I think that people get really excited about tree planting in part because it's a solution that seems to exist outside of politics and 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.
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SPEAKER_13: Yeah, so one of the things that I found interesting in learning all about bogs was all the language around them. You know, you've got so many different words for bogs.
SPEAKER_11: Bog, fen, mire, moor, marsh, swamp, pockesen.
SPEAKER_13: This is Merritt Terecki, again, the Queen of Peete from our story. And she says that, you know, these aren't synonyms necessarily. There are subtle differences between all these different words.
SPEAKER_11: Some of them are rooted in ecology and wetland classification. Some of them are regional.
SPEAKER_13: But there's also 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 Peetland science way, but in this kind of more poetic metaphorical sense. And usually bog language connotes stuckness. Right, like getting bogged down in something, yeah.
SPEAKER_13: Right, exactly. But there's a lot of other examples, like a quagmire is a type of bog. And you can get mired 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 a kind of marshy, boggy wetland, but also like a confusing situation that you might get stuck in. So what is the explanation
SPEAKER_02: for why we use these words so much? When most people probably don't experience bogs on a really regular basis?
SPEAKER_13: You know, I think that for Merritt Terecki, 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,
SPEAKER_11: not being land, not being water, not being fully alive, not being fully dead, they're 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.
SPEAKER_13: And this is totally true in books and movies. Like I remember in Wuthering Heights, you have the moors, which are often, are presented throughout the book as this kind of foreboding landscape where they might, you know, Catherine and Heathcliff might get lost or drown. 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.
SPEAKER_01: There are dead things, dead faces in the water.
SPEAKER_02: 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. It's so upsetting.
SPEAKER_13: 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. You know, the one that really comes to mind for me is the Princess Bride.
SPEAKER_11: 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.
SPEAKER_04: I mean, what are the three terrors of the fire swamp? One, the flames burn. No problem. There's a popping sound proceeding each. We can avoid that. Two, the lightning sand. But you were clever enough to discover what that looks like, so in the future, we can avoid that too. Wesley, what about the ROUSs? Rodents of unusual size?
SPEAKER_04: I don't think they exist.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, how could you forget the rodents of unusual size?
SPEAKER_13: Right. And you know, the ROUSs obviously don't really exist, but Terecky says that some aspects of the fire swamp aren't quite as far-fetched as you might imagine. There are gases, some of them are flammable,
SPEAKER_11: 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.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that is shocking that that could be based in any kind of reality. I mean, come to think of it, 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.
SPEAKER_13: 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 a caricature based in some amount of real accurate details of what it's like, but it also falls really short in fully appreciating them for the incredible places that they are.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I have to admit, bogs are like my favorite ecosystem. I think they're so cool. I used to study botany in the Midwest. There's much more bogs. There's no bogs here, really, on the West Coast to speak of, but there's real bogs there. I like a cranberry bog. I like a quaking bog. I mean, a quaking bog is like where the sphagnum grows so thick that trees can grow on it. And if you get enough people, they can jump on the sphagnum and trees can sway from you jumping on the ground. It is like, bogs are amazing. I love them.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I wanted to pitch this story because I wanted to go to Scotland and check out these bogs because I also think bogs are like- I'm so sorry. And then that immediately became an impossibility with the COVID situation. But can I share one cool bog fact that I didn't get to work into the story? Oh, absolutely. Go for it. So did you know that bogs breathe? No, I did not know that.
SPEAKER_13: So there's this common phenomenon in peatland science called bog breathing.
SPEAKER_11: 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 peat layer responds.
SPEAKER_02: So it's not really breathing as in like respiration. It's more like a metaphor of movement when they say bog breathing.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, yeah. It's almost like, I like think of it as like, the bog is like a giant's belly that's like rising and falling as the ecosystem sort of breeds in and out. It takes on more space and kind of pushes up to the sky,
SPEAKER_11: 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.
SPEAKER_13: And this isn't a new phenomenon. Like scientists have known about bog breathing for a really long time.
SPEAKER_09: But it's incredibly difficult to measure.
SPEAKER_13: So this is Roxanne Anderson again.
SPEAKER_09: 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. If you try to measure that by walking onto the bog, which is an unstable and wobbly surface, it's gonna be very difficult.
SPEAKER_02: Right, it's like trying to measure the surface of a water bed. Like it constantly moves underneath your feet. That must be really frustrating if you're trying to measure it.
SPEAKER_13: 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.
SPEAKER_09: And what we've been looking at is using satellites that uses radar.
SPEAKER_13: 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 from the satellite data as a indicator of the overall health of the peatland? It's like a doctor putting a stethoscope to your back
SPEAKER_02: and saying, deep breath.
SPEAKER_13: Right, right, exactly, exactly. And I think gathering that data could help scientists understand whether a peatland is functioning as a healthy peatland 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.
SPEAKER_02: So what's the pattern they're finding? And like, how do you tell if the breathing of a bog is healthy or not?
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I asked Roxanne that.
SPEAKER_09: So what we found is that kind of healthy peatland, if you like, they have one peak and one trough roughly every year. And the peak is usually, if they're really healthy, it's usually gonna be in the autumn with quite a high amplitude. And then the trough is gonna 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.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_09: And then the more degraded it gets, the more it just becomes kind of no peaks, no troughs, just kind of a flatter line.
SPEAKER_02: Well, you don't wanna see a flat line like an EKG. You don't want that.
SPEAKER_13: 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 peatland conservation globally.
SPEAKER_09: I think that the interesting thing for me about this is that it completely changes the way that we can understand peatland 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 peatland, you might end up with knowing what the signal or the breathing pattern for a particular type of peatland is, and you might be able to detect anomalies that are, you know, diagnostic of degradation for peatlands that, you know, that are impossible to reach or very, very difficult to reach, that are really remote or impossible to visit on a regular basis.
SPEAKER_13: And this is really important because like, you know, so many peatlands are in these remote locations and they're places that humans have tended to avoid. And we're actually still discovering new peatlands and often they're really hard to access. And so it could be this really helpful tool in mapping and understanding the role that peatlands are playing as carbon sinks or as carbon sources.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, one of the things that I think is really interesting about the story is that the peatlands 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.
SPEAKER_13: Right, exactly. And it's like 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 wellbeing is sort of caught up in that carbon beneath these hotspots all over the world.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Oh, that's so cool. Well, I love bogs even more now. Thank you so much, Emmet. Yeah, of course. This classic episode of 99PI was produced by Emmet Fitzgerald and mixed by Bryson Barnes. Tech production on this update by Martine Gonzalez and Jacob Maldonado Medina. Music by Swan Rialo. Delaney Hall is the executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivian Lay, Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Laushen Madon, Sophia Klatsker, Jason De Leon, Joe Rosenberg, Intern Sarah Bake, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to Jesse Reynolds of UCLA, who we spoke to for this story, and also writers Virginia Guin and Sharon Levy, whose articles about flow country got us interested in the region. For more articles about peatland restoration in Scotland, we will have links on the website. 99% Invisible is part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org, or on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.
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