New imaging method looks at Earth at new levels

A new imaging method can now view soil carbon at near-atomic levels, which has shown that the earth's soil has more than three times the amount of carbon that can be found in the atmosphere.

A study was published on Nov. 30 sharing the research.

“If there is an overlooked mechanism that can help us retain more carbon in soils, then that will help our climate,” Johannes Lehmann, a Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science, Soil and Crop Sciences Section, in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, said in the news release.

Angela Possinger, a graduate student in Lehmann’s lab and a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia Tech University, is the paper’s first author, the news release states. The paper is titled “Organo-organic and Organo-mineral Interfaces in Soil at the Nanometer Scale."

"We had an unexpected finding where we could see interfaces between different forms of carbon and not just between carbon and minerals,” Possinger said in the news release. “We could start to look at those interfaces and try to understand something about those interactions.”

Possinger said the technique discussed in the paper found that there were several layers of carbon that are around organic interfaces and that nitrogen played an important role in facilitating the interactions between mineral interfaces and organic interfaces.

“We had to develop a technique that essentially keeps the soil particles frozen throughout the process of making very thin slices to look at these tiny interfaces,” Possinger said in the news release.

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Alumni Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Technical University of Munich Institute for Advanced Study.

“Our physics colleagues are leading the way globally to improve our ability to look very closely into material properties,” Lehmann said in the news release. “Without such interdisciplinary collaboration, these breakthroughs are not possible.”