This ancient bit of ingenuity keeps carbon trapped for thousands of years

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This ancient bit of ingenuity keeps carbon trapped for thousands of years

For all its plant and animal life aboveground, the Amazon rainforest’s soils are surprisingly poor in nutrients necessary for growing food. Thousands of years ago, the region’s Indigenous peoples solved this problem by creating “terra preta” from table scraps and charcoal and tucking it away in the hostile soil. Today, that ancient bit of ingenuity is a powerful climate solution. As biomass like trees and crops grow, they sequester carbon in the…