Arctic Peatlands Expanding

<p>BELTRAN: Millions of years before humans worried about climate change, the planet had already devised its own way of removing carbon from the atmosphere. In oxygen-deprived wetlands all over the world, dead plant material accumulates instead of fully decomposing, gradually forming peat that locks away its carbon. Over millions of years, peat eventually fossilizes to become coal. It's how the planet has sequestered carbon to cool down since the much hotter times when dinosaurs roamed under palm trees near the North and South poles. So recent findings that peatlands are expanding northward as the Arctic warms might sound like good news. But it's not that simple, and one problem is time, since it takes millennia for peat to sequester large amounts of carbon, while we are burning fossil fuels far more quickly than the Earth can absorb. One of the researchers studying the changes in peatlands is Angela Gallego-Sala, a professor and biogeochemist at the University of Exeter in the UK who coauthored a 2026 study on Arctic peatland expansion. She's also a lead author for the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and spoke with Living on Earth's Jenni Doering.</p>