A team of researchers from the universities of Leeds, in the United Kingdom, and Marien Ngouabi, in the Republic of Congo, together with experts from the Society for the Conservation of Wildlife, has discovered in a little-explored area of the Republic of the Congo, in central Africa, an immense peat bog that could cover between 100,000 and 200,000 square kilometers , twice the area of Castilla y León. The study of the super-swamp could provide key data on the evolution of climate change in the region.
As Simon Lewis, an expert in tropical forest ecology at the University of Leeds, explained to the BBC, “ few people venture into these quagmires ; It is not easy at all to get around them or work here.
Also, it can only be accessed for a couple of months a year , right at the end of the dry season. In any case, it is striking that there are still territories on the planet that have not been mapped ”.
Scientists estimate that billions of tons of decaying vegetation and layers of mud accumulate in these ponds that in some places reach 7 meters deep. “The processes that originate this landscape are typical of cold areas; in fact, they are not very common in the tropics, which makes this discovery unusual, ”Lewis pointed out.
“ Peatlands have behaved as large carbon sinks , taking in from the atmosphere, for the last 10,000 years. From deposits like this we can study the carbon cycle before humans intervened in it and altered it ”.
