ORONO, Maine, May 8 -- University of Maine issued the following news release:
Photosynthesis is the oldest carbon-capture technology on Earth. For eons, plants have pulled carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locked carbon - the building block of life on our planet - into their bodies and roots.
In young forests, the widespread consensus is that this process rapidly pulls, or sequesters, carbon from the atmosphere. As forests mature, more trees start to die, releasing the carbon they captured in their wake. Carbon sequestration, the thinking goes, slowly stalls and old forests eventually release roughly as much carbon into the air as they capture.
Thirty years of measurements taken by University of Maine scientists at a remote 550-acre...