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Highly stable rice-straw-derived charcoal in 3700-year-old ancient paddy soil: evidence for an effective pathway toward carbon sequestration

  • Selected Papers from the 2nd Contaminated Land, Ecological Assessment and Remediation (CLEAR 2014) Conference: Environmental Pollution and Remediation
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Abstract

Recalcitrant charcoal application is predicted to decelerate global warming through creating a long-term carbon sink in soil. Although many studies have showed high stability of charcoal derived from woody materials, few have focused on the dynamics of straw-derived charcoal in natural environment on a long timescale to evaluate its potential for agricultural carbon sequestration. Here, we examined straw-derived charcoal in an ancient paddy soil dated from ~3700 calendar year before present (cal. year bp). Analytical results showed that soil organic matter consisted of more than 25 % of charcoal in charcoal-rich layer. Similarities in morphology and molecular structure between the ancient and the fresh rice-straw-derived charcoal indicated that ancient charcoal was derived from rice straw. The lower carbon content, higher oxygen content, and obvious carbonyl of the ancient charcoal compared with fresh rice straw charcoal implied that oxidation occurred in the scale of thousands years. However, the dominant aromatic C of ancient charcoal indicated that rice-straw-derived charcoal was highly stable in the buried paddy soil due to its intrinsic chemical structures and the physical protection of ancient paddy wetland. Therefore, it may suggest that straw charcoal application is a potential pathway for C sequestration considering its longevity.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41271247), the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (20110101110083), and the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (R5100044). The NMR analysis was performed in the Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Laboratory, Nanjing University. We sincerely thank Xiaokang Ke at Nanjing University for assistance on NMR analysis and Dr. Saran Paul Sohi for providing helpful comments on the manuscript.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Research involving human participants and/or animals

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou, 310058, China

    Mengxiong Wu, Min Yang, Xingguo Han, Ting Zhong & Weixiang Wu

  2. State Grid Anhui Economic Research Institute, Hefei, 230031, China

    Min Yang

  3. Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Hangzhou, 310014, China

    Yunfei Zheng & Pin Ding

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  1. Mengxiong Wu
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  2. Min Yang
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  3. Xingguo Han
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  7. Weixiang Wu
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Correspondence to Weixiang Wu.

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Responsible editor: Zhihong Xu

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Wu, M., Yang, M., Han, X. et al. Highly stable rice-straw-derived charcoal in 3700-year-old ancient paddy soil: evidence for an effective pathway toward carbon sequestration. Environ Sci Pollut Res 23, 1007–1014 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-015-4422-x

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