In northwestern Montana’s Swan Valley, a pile of about 100 small logs, 10 feet long or so, sits neatly stacked, ringed by berry bushes, a few white wildflowers, and towering larch trees. Surrounding the logs are several acres of U.S. Forest Service land, which was thinned of dead, downed, and dense understory trees last year to reduce wildfire risk. The log pile that remains is too small to be processed into lumber, plus the sawmill just down the highway recently closed. So the wood may get sent to a pulp mill, if the price is right. Or it may sit in the forest for years. Smaller limbs may be burned in a prescribed fire. But Ning Zeng, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland, is sizing up the pile, too. He sees another solution: burying the logs, and all the planet-heating gases they’d otherwise release, underground.
That’s the idea of a carbon sequestration technique called wood vaulting. Forests throughout much of the western U.S. are overgrown, full of tangled trees and brush that’s primed to burn. The Forest Service’s wildfire crisis str... Read more
