Wood burial in the Bengal Fan

Researchers report the presence of millimeter- to centimeter-sized wood fragments in sediment cores from the Bengal Fan, a large and active sedimentary deposit in the Bay of Bengal, episodically deposited over the past 19 million years, with wood carbon constituting 0.16% of the coarse-grained sediment mass–half the typical organic carbon concentration of suspended sediments in the modern Ganges-Brahmaputra river system; the finding suggests that wood burial at continental margins may be a previously overlooked component of carbon sequestration, according to the authors.

Article #19-13714: “Sustained wood burial in the Bengal Fan over the last 19 My,” by Hyejung Lee et al.

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