By In 2013, Ning Zeng came across a very old, and ultimately very important, log.
He and his colleagues were digging a trench in the Canadian province of Quebec, one that they planned to fill with 35 metric tons of wood, cover with clay soil, and let sit for nine years. The team hoped to show that the wood wouldn’t decompose, a proof-of-concept that burying biomass could be a cheap way to store climate-warming carbon. But during excavation, they unearthed a pristine, twisted log that was very old, older than anything they could have possibly produced in their experiment.
