Yale-Led Study Finds Mississippi River Basin Farmland Liming Acts as Major Carbon Sink
A new Yale-led study has revealed that farmers in the Mississippi River Basin are storing more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the soil than they emit by adding limestone to their fields, a practice known as 'liming.' This finding, published in the journal Nature, challenges conventional greenhouse gas accounting methods, including those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which typically treat the carbon in applied lime as emitted CO2. The study, led by geochemist Tim Jesper Suhrhoff, a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture, analyzed over a century of data. It concludes that agricultural liming, which involves spreading crushed limestone to raise soil pH, reduce acidity, and increase crop yields, results in net carbon removal in the long term. This is because the limestone reacts with CO2 in the soil to form stable bicarbonate ions that can travel through soils, groundwater, and rivers, eventually reaching the ocean where the carbon can be stored for extend...
