Outside/In

 Transcript: 10x10: Kettle Bog

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context/nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. 

[Sound of walking in snowshoes]  

One of the things I’ve become obsessed with, while doing this job is the pleistocene… that’s the nerd name for the most recent ice age. 

In particular, I’m really taken with the late pleistocene. The time in which the ice was melting back, and in its place came… everything. Plants, animals, people. 

[More walking tape]

What if there were a way to see that time? To feel what it was like to live just past the edge of the ice?

Sara ErnstB: Maybe can you just describe our surrounds here?

Tom Lee: Yeah so we’re in a depression. A depression in the landscape of about forty or fifty feet. And down here in the depression it’s fairly flat… kind of hummocky, [fades down]

You’re hearing Tom Lee. We’ve interviewed Tom before, he was a botanist at the University of New Hampshire who retired just a tiny bit before we recorded this. We took this walk on one of the few genuinely cold days in a distressingly warm New England winter. 

Tom Lee: What about 15 twenty degrees?

Sara ErnstB: It said nineteen on my car… but maybe a little less down here

Tom Lee: Maybe a little cooler, it’s a bit of a frost pocket

We are in… one of the most unique places I’ve ever visited in New England… it’s like a giant, nearly perfectly circular bowl. Imagine one of those movies where the protagonists are walking around confused in some huge depression, and the camera zooms back and you realize they’re in some giant dinosaur footprint. It’s kinda like that. 

[Big hit of mux]

Sara ErnstB: now here we are in the center and we can really see the shape of thing and it’s… it almost looks like somebody came in with a bunch of excavators and dug out like an arena.

Tom Lee: and almost a perfect circle… just a little bit more oval than circle… it’s remarkable. 

[music]

Tom Lee: And it was caused by apparently, by the residual chunk of ice. 

Ok get on your deep time hat… your deep time goggles… 

15,000 years ago… this spot was covered with ice… ice that’s melting away… slowly, over thousands of years. Each year, this glacier the size of a continent was a little bit smaller. 

As the edge of that ice gets to here… this spot… maybe 8000 years ago… something happens. Maybe an iceberg the size of a city block falls off [calving glacier sfx] crashes to the ground below. It sits there for another… who knows… couple hundred years? And sand, rocks, dirt — the detritus of the millenniums-long geological siege that the glaciers have been waging on the bedrock beneath them — piles up around the block of ice, like a donut  

Tom Lee: ...and the temperatures warmed, the ice melted and left a depression with a pool at the bottom. 

Most waterbodies — and maybe this sounds dumb to observe — BUT most waterbodies are formed by flowing water. But because of the unique origin story of this bog, it has some unique properties.

The only water flowing in comes from rain or melting snow. And there’s nowhere for the water to flow out. This results in a couple of things: the water is very low in nutrients, which leads to certain plants taking over… notably a thick mat of something called sphagnum moss which stretches over the surface of the water. 

Tom Lee: In the summer when you’re out here, you can literally bounce up and down on this thing… it’s like a trampoline.

As a quick disclaimer that this is probably something that we should not be encouraging you to do because Leave No Trace and all AND I would actually say it’s more like jumping on a waterbed than a trampoline BUT, IT’S TRUE. The moss squelches and sags beneath you… the water seeps through and soaks you up to your shins. 

The moss grows in slowly from the edges… coating the surface of the water… and in many bogs… there’s an eye of open water in the middle…

Tom Lee: Right around the eye is the floating mat, so if we dug down from where we’re standing we’d come to open water. 

Sphagnum was used as diapers by people throughout boreal regions and for binding wounds by ancient gaelic and irish warriors… but it’s also the engineer of this ecosystem to make use of what little nutrients there are in this water, it pumps out acid. The water in this bog has both the color, and the acidity of coffee.

This is why so-called bog-bodies — people whose remains are found preserved in bogs — are so well preserved… not only is there not enough oxygen to decompose the remains, but also the acidic water pickles them… like a big bog pickle...

This means that you get an unusual mix of plants in these bogs…

Tom Lee: Dominated by shrub vegetation maybe members of the heath family, high bush blueberry, leatherleaf, bog rosemary, plants you don’t really find commonly out there in the landscape and there’s some black spruce down here too… and those are plants you find more commonly way up north up in the boreal forest and tundra environments. 

In spots like this, and there’s this lifting of the veil… it’s one of those places where you can see geologic forces except in real time. 

This is what it would have looked like as the Pleistocene ended… when the ice was still part of our collective memory… and when the mammoths were still roaming the New England steppe. 

Tom Lee: And so it’s a very unique flora here… it’s like stepping back into the ice age. 

This a mire. A muskeg… a moorland. 

This is a kettle bog.

[Outside/In theme music]

This is Outside/In, a show about the outside world and how we use it. I’m Sam Evans-Brown. Today on the show, another of our occasional series 10x10, where we dive deep into places often overlooked. This time around: beneath the shrubs, sedges, rushes, and moss of the bog there’s something else: PEAT. It has been piling up for millennia, but what happens to it in the next hundred years, may well define our future.  

We’re going deep on peat.

[Outside/In Theme]

Laphroaig Promotional Video: We’re here now at the Laphroaig peat beds, a very special place for us. And what we do here… this is where we cut the peats that give us the flavor that we use to flavor the malted barley… [fades down] 

What do you think of… when you hear the word peat?

Laphroaig Promotional Video: How do you cut peat… well you need to use tools like these here. 

If you are like the members of the Outside/In team, you may think of scotch. 

[cork popping]

Which is why producer Justine Paradis gathered us all together for a little tasting session…  

[Whisky pouring]

Justine Paradis: I can smell that like across the table. 

… and called up Kara Newman, the spirits editor of Wine Enthusiast Magazine. 

Kara Newman: The thing is about scotch is that it’s made only with a very small handful of ingredients. It’s made with barley, it’s made with water, it’s made with yeast… and that’s it. 

Erika Janik: Time…

Justine Paradis: And time… nice…

Jimmy Gutierrez: oooooOOOooOoo

Barley, water, yeast and time… but there’s one more ingredient in some scotches that’s allowed… peat. Well… I mean, it’s only sort of... but not even really an ingredient. 

Kara Newman: So the peat is dug up from peat bogs… and then it’s drained, it’s put into a kiln and the smoke is allowed to flavor the barley. And then the barley later is fermented, distilled, and miraculously retains the smokey flavor from peat smoke. 

But as any scotch aficionado will tell you — and I have learned that we have at least two who work for our podcast... 

Jimmy Gutierrez: Like if people order at a bar… they’re getting 90 percent… like the majority of what they’re ordering is coming from Speyside. 

Erika Janik: MacAllen… MAC-allen! That’s how Scotts say it.

Justine Paradis: Bartender Jimmy is really coming out here! [laughter]

Erika Janik: I know I love it! 

...peat is a broad category.

Kara Newman: If you go to Islay for example… the flavor there … I mean the tasting notes you get are things like seaweed, and smoked bacon and smoked salmon and barbeque… 

Erika Janik: When I was at Glenfiddich they described it as tastes and smells like gasoline.

Justine Paradis: [laughs] In a good way!

Erika Janik: I was like… ugh, how dare you!

Each region has its own kind of peat… its own peaty flavors… its own peatoir

Kara Newman: If you head a bit further North to Orkney it’s more wetland vegetation and all that constant seaspray means the plants don’t really grow so well, and you wind up with more herbaceous, pine-like, earthy flavor.

Justine Paradis: Does it taste like a wetland to you?  

Kara Newman: ...campfire...

Erika Janik: ...and then Laphroaig! 

Jimmy Gutierrez: Ooo. Select.

Kara Newman: ...brooding...

Sara Ernst: Oh wow my mouth is tingling.

Kara Newman: ...peppery...

Jimmy Gutierrez: Is this your best day at work ever?

Erika Janik: It was very exciting buying all of this. 

This is, perhaps, how most people have interacted with peat… they know it in the abstract... a flavor. But if it’s something we’re cutting — something we’re burning — what is it? 

Sara ErnstB: And ok. To ask this once again, just like in brute layman’s terms… what is peat?

Tom Lee: Peat is dead, formerly living plant material

That was Tom Lee again, and this is Ruth Varner … 

Ruth Varner: We find peatlands in all climatic regimes, essentially, and what you really need is a place that is wet…

...another researcher at the University of New Hampshire who studies peatlands, a colleague of Tom’s. 

 Ruth Varner: and what happens is when a system is saturated, the rates of decomposition of that organic matter that’s there are really slow.

So, low decomposition. Why?

In a rushing bubbling creek the water has some oxygen… but bogs form in places where water is just slowly seeping in from the rain… there’s no inlet, and no outlet. 

Tom Lee: Well there’s several things going on here. One is that you do have still water. And as a result oxygen tends to be depleted from the water by the plants and other organisms growing here, and isn’t recharged.  

Most of the bacteria that decompose stuff, use oxygen to break things down and produce carbon dioxide as a byproduct, but in a bog, they can’t go to work. They don’t have any fuel. So all of these crumbling plant corpses — all of this carbon-based material — it just piles up and up and up.  

Ruth Varner: The rates of decomposition of that organic matter that’s there are really slow… so they’re slower than the amount of organic matter that’s being input into the system… and so you get an accumulation of carbon over time. And the time span we’re thinking of is thousands and thousands of years.

Imagine: under your feet in a bog like this, layered dead plants might go down one… two… three even four stories. An inverted skyscraper of stored carbon. 

Tom Lee: So it’s at least 45 feet… maybe as deep as 50 or 55 feet. It goes down quite a ways. And so over ten thousand years, there’s been an accumulation here of at least 45 feet of peat. That’s amazing… that’s amazing!

And we’re just standing in one particular bog… my personal favorite kind of bog… this kettle bog formed by a depression left by a big chunk of ice.

But there are many different kinds of peatlands.

Around here, in temperate regions: 

Ruth Varner: It’s pretty dominated by mosses, so you’re thinking about sphagnum moss, which you may have used in gardening? Added peat moss to your garden. 

… this the peat that’s flavoring your scotch whisky…

Sara Ernst: You gotta do a little wafting.

Justine Paradis: oh yeah, she said the aroma, especially with the peaty ones, is where this comes from… [fades down]

… but there’s also sub-tropical and tropical peat…

Ruth Varner: Peatlands in tropical systems… they’re probably going to be more fibrous with remains of trees in them. So you’re going to have large trees that fall into a saturated systems and so for example if you took a core from that peat from a tropical system it’s going to have a very different texture.

… these also include mangrove swamps, which are one of the most effective ecosystems in the world when it comes to sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, and are expanding thanks to climate change, according to a 2015 study. 

And of course, arctic peat, which includes the infamous permafrost.

Ruth Varner: Permafrost is defined as ground that is permanently frozen for two years or more. 

In all of these environments, there’s a weird thing going on. Plants need nutrients to thrive, and peat is full of nutrients, but the plants... they can’t get to it. 

Tom Lee: You know there’s sort of an irony here… we have 45 feet, in some places, of peat…

Sara ErnstB: Pure organic material!

Tom Lee: Pure! With kinds of nutrients in it… nitrogen, phosphorous, calcium… but it’s not accessible to these plants and other organisms because the decomposers can’t break this stuff down, and — somewhat hilariously —  all these plants are short of nutrients… and they’re doing everything they can to build up their nutrient levels… many of them are evergreen. Keeping your leaves, not shedding them is one way to keep you nutrients, especially nitrogen. But some of the plants here are carnivorous. We have purple pitcher plants here, as well as sundews and bladderwort… these are three carnivores that live in this bog. And so, they’re adapted essentially to low-nutrient conditions and carnivory enables them… helps them to live in a place like this. 

[music again]

Most ecosystems accumulate carbon up to a point. Eventually they reach kind of an equilibrium, a stage at which they are releasing as much as they are taking up. But bogs are different. Peatlands, are in essence, one route to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere… lock it up in plants… and then when those plants die lock it up underwater… and then with the passage of geologic time… lock it up in rock.

[music]

But… we’ve been focusing on peat formed in places like New Hampshire… places where the reason peat stays peat is because it stays wet. 

But 80 percent of all the carbon that’s locked up in peat isn’t there because it’s wet… but because it’s frozen.

After a break, we’ll talk about permafrost. 

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<BREAK>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

This Is Isla Myers-Smith… and her collaborator Jeff Kerby. I interviewed them at the sam time… and remotely… which can be awkward!

Jeff Kerby: Well

Isla Meyers Smith: Do you want to start?

Jeff Kerby: I’ll just say something really briefly here. 

They’re both ecologists, Isla at the University of Edinburgh and Jeff at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies in Denmark.

So… what scientists say is that  there’s a lot of carbon in stored in arctic peat. How much?

Isla Meyers Smith: The projection is that if a lot or most of that carbon was released from those permafrost soils… that would double the atmospheric CO2 concentration… so it is quite a lot of carbon, and there is still debate going on about exactly how much carbon that is.

I will repeat this fact because it is a whopper of a fact. If all of the carbon that’s stored in the permafrost were released it would double atmospheric CO2. 

This is perhaps the most dreaded of all of climate feedback loops. 

As the world gets warmer, the soil in the arctic that usually stays frozen all year round starts to thaw. As it thaws, it starts to sink… subside… river banks slump and mini-landslides expose organic material that has been locked in the ice for millennia to all of those little microbes in the air, hungry to eat them up and turn them into carbon dioxide… which in turn makes the world warmer.

Some people have called this “the carbon bomb.”

Jeff Kerby: So there’s a very legitimate theoretical concern about this carbon bomb. 

But — and I don’t say this lightly — talking to Isla and Jeff made me realize, the question of what the heck is going to happen in the arctic as the world warms up, is maybe one of the most complicated ones we’ve ever grappled with… and we’re only… like part way through grappling with it. 

Trees are starting to grow on the tundra where they never grew before which will trap more carbon, but might trap more snow which might insulate the ground better in the winter, which might melt more permafrost which might release all that carbon but how long might that take? 

Isla Meyers Smith: Can I add another level of complexity here… just to fully blow your mind?

Isla and Jeff study plants: they look at them on the ground, using drone photography, and using satellites...

Isla Meyers Smith: But all of those measurements are just what’s happening above the ground, but a lot of the really important questions about what’s happening to carbon in this system are happening below the ground… and the below ground is just a black box at the moment. 

So this question… what the heck is going to happen to all of that arctic peat… all of that carbon that before we started monkeying with the thermostat was just going to stay down there … it’s probably the biggest known unknown in the world of climate change right now. 

Something that kind of blew my mind when reporting this… those global climate models that we’ve been using to try to get a glimpse of our future? Most of them don’t even model permafrost. When it comes to arctic peat… the models just shrug.

Jeff Kerby: that’s just one of the challenges of studying nonlinear feedbacks, they’re hard to study.

[music]

But here’s the other thing about peat. If you leave it alone, if we let it pile up... if we gave it long enough… that kettle bog where we started out turns into something else. Maybe, trees start to grow up on top of the peat… maybe a river changes course and buries it under sediment… maybe tectonic plates drift, continents shift… the peat is folded, heated, compressed… 

Ruth Varner: So of course, the organic matter that we’re storing will, over many millions of years, become some kind of fossil fuel.

There was one particularly peaty time in the earth’s history. Back before the dinosaurs… in the days of Pangea… the days when there was much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere… a much warmer, much wetter, much swampier time… It was called the carboniferous era, and it’s when most of the earth’s coal was formed...

Ruth Varner: And so that carbon that accumulated there… actually yes has become the coal that we use now. 

[Music]

So if you ever get the chance to tromp over a floating mat of sphagnum moss, stretched like a thin sheet, over the bouncy waterbed of a partially frozen bog… just remember that beneath your feet is the source of our whole current climate predicament — as well as, arguably, one of its solutions too… an ancient sink… an inverted skyscraper of carbon 

Credits: 

OUTSIDE/IN IS WAS PRODUCED THIS WEEK BY Me Sam Evans-Brown, with help from Taylor Quimby, Justine Paradis, and Jimmy Gutierrez, 

Erika Janik is our Executive producer. Maureen McMurray is director of hiding whiskey in studio-safe no-spill containers.

Just as a small side-note… these are unprecedented times and our lives are all pretty tumultuous. The Outside/In team is all working remotely, recording ourselves and our interviews in closets and basements and attics… and we just want you to know that… hey. We’re right here with you. 

We’d love to get feedback on what you’d like to hear from US going forward. Do you want Outside/In to tell you more things about epidemiology and health? Or do you want us to just keep making the show… keep doing what we’re doing?

Let us know by reaching out however you please: our email is Outsidein@nhpr.org. You can find us on twitter at outsideinradio and on facebook, most of our activity is happening in our closed facebook group. We keep it closed so as to keep it friendly and civil and moderated. But just click and we’ll let you right in. 

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE BY Blue dot Sessions, poddington bear, and Ikimashi Oi.

OUR THEME MUSIC WAS MADE BY BREAKMASTER CYLINDER.

OUTSIDE IN IS A PRODUCTION OF NEW HAMPSHIRE PUBLIC RADIO.