Canada has the biggest logjam in the world

In the northern part of Canada there is a part of the Arctic where an entire city is made of logs. The English word for it is “Sawdust“, which can be translated as “log jam”, and as the name suggests is a more or less extensive area in which a large amount of plant material is accumulated. on the site Even for thousands of years. The Sawdust The Canadian is the largest in the world: it covers an area the size of Manhattan, and it has an enormous amount of CO in its trunks.₂, which must be carefully preserved in times of global warming. Yet those who study congestion say its potential impact (and that of such structures in general) is often overlooked. To address this shortcoming, Alicia Centrowski, researcher MIT Extension Specializing in hydraulic engineering, he mapped the entire area SawdustHe read their age and calculated the CO content₂. Results are published on that day Geophysical Research Letters.

A city of records. The Sawdust Located in the delta of the Mackenzie River in the Nunavut territory of Canada (it is not the only country, but it is the largest). It covers an area of ​​51 km² (roughly as large as the entire borough of Manhattan), and is composed of approximately 400,000 small deposits clustered in the area – “small” being relative, the largest of these particles covers an equivalent area. 20 football fields. Sendrowski’s team studied and mapped traffic congestion with the help of high-resolution satellite images and drone reconnaissance, and was then able to accurately estimate CO content.₂ In the whole area – CO₂ It is “placed” in the trunks, but also in the underlying soil. And it’s about 3.4 million tonnes: that’s the equivalent of the annual emissions of two and a half million cars, so it’s important that it stays in that form and isn’t emitted into the atmosphere.

How old are they? How did all those trees pile up in one place? Traffic congestion records come from the many rivers that flow through the Nunavut region and converge at the Mackenzie. Its delta is particularly large, so it can accommodate huge amounts of material. It has been accumulating in the region for thousands of years: dating of records shows that many are recent, but a significant percentage have been in the region for at least 1,300 years. In addition, the trunks analyzed so far are very shallow: according to the author of the study, even tens of thousands of years old specimens are found deep.