El Dorado Located

As I have posted on extensively, the creation of terra preta soils permitted dense urbanized Stone Age populations.  Present day clearing activity is now exposing their presence for the archeological record.

 

It is noteworthy that these cities show dates only as early as 200 AD.  This is likely a result of limited sampling.  The tool set necessary was already a couple of thousand years old.  This is common though for such dating because most samples come from areas representing the maximization of the culture and likely miss the long early development.

 

The late dates support the idea that the whole society was extent when the new world was discovered.  Once again Europeans did not so much as miss these antique civilizations so much as their pathogens got there first and threw these societies down.  The nastiest pathogen was the slave trade of course.

 

With out question, these were states and they certainly fit the story of El Dorado.  They most likely decorated buildings with gold and this enhanced the story.  We are not seeing stone structures but we did not see them in Mesopotamia either.  We have mounds and these were certain to hold wood frame structures of the leaders.

 

Terra preta made possible an Amazonian population in the tens of millions.  The culture itself most likely prevented it from happening except for locales like this.

 

Amazon explorers uncover signs of a real El Dorado

 

Satellite technology detects giant mounds over 155 miles, pointing to sophisticated pre-Columbian culture

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/05/amazon-dorado-satellite-discovery

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/1/6/1262773040517/arthworks-built-by-a-lost-001.jpg

An aerial picture of traces of earthworks built by a lost Amazonian civilisation dating to 200AD. Photograph: National Geographic

It is the legend that drew legions of explorers and adventurers to their deaths: an ancient empire of citadels and treasure hidden deep in theAmazon jungle.

Spanish conquistadores ventured into the rainforest seeking fortune, followed over the centuries by others convinced they would find a lost civilisation to rival the Aztecs and Incas.

Some seekers called it El Dorado, others the City of Z. But the jungle swallowed them and nothing was found, prompting the rest of the world to call it a myth. The Amazon was too inhospitable, said 20th century scholars, to permit large human settlements.

Now, however, the doomed dreamers have been proved right: there was a great civilisation. New satellite imagery and fly-overs have revealed more than 200 huge geometric earthworks carved in the upper Amazon basin near Brazil's border with Bolivia.

Spanning 155 miles, the circles, squares and other geometric shapes form a network of avenues, ditches and enclosures built long before Christopher Columbus set foot in the new world. Some date to as early as 200 AD, others to 1283.

Scientists who have mapped the earthworks believe there may be another 2,000 structures beneath the jungle canopy, vestiges of vanished societies.

The structures, many of which have been revealed by the clearance of forest for agriculture, point to a "sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society", says the journal Antiquity, which has published the research.

The article adds: "This hitherto unknown people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads. The 'geoglyph culture' stretches over a region more than 250km across, and exploits both the floodplains and the uplands … we have so far seen no more than a tenth of it."

The structures were created by a network of trenches about 36ft (nearly 11 metres) wide and several feet deep, lined by banks up to 3ft high. Some were ringed by low mounds containing ceramics, charcoal and stone tools. It is thought they were used for fortifications, homes and ceremonies, and could have maintained a population of 60,000 – more people than in many medieval European cities.

The discoveries have demolished ideas that soils in the upper Amazon were too poor to support extensive agriculture, says Denise Schaan, a co-author of the study and anthropologist at the Federal University of Pará, in Belém, Brazil. She told National Geographic: "We found this picture is wrong. And there is a lot more to discover in these places, it's never-ending. Every week we find new structures."

Many of the mounds were symmetrical and slanted to the north, prompting theories that they had astronomical significance.

Researchers were especially surprised that earthworks in floodplains and uplands were of a similar style, suggesting they were all built by the same culture.

"In Amazonian archaeology you always have this idea that you find different peoples in different ecosystems," said Schaan. "So it was odd to have a culture that would take advantage of different ecosystems and expand over such a large region." The first geometric shapes were spotted in 1999 but it is only now, as satellite imagery and felling reveal sites, that the scale of the settlements is becoming clear. Some anthropologists say the feat, requiring sophisticated engineering, canals and roads, rivals Egypt's pyramids.

The findings follow separate discoveries further south, in the Xingu region, of interconnected villages known as "garden cities". Dating between 800 and 1600, they included houses, moats and palisades.

"These revelations are exploding our perceptions of what the Americas really looked liked before the arrival of Christopher Columbus," said David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z, a book about an attempt in the 1920s to find signs of Amazonian civilizations. "The discoveries are challenging long-held assumptions about the Amazon as a Hobbesian place where only small primitive tribes could ever have existed, and about the limits the environment placed on the rise of early civilisations."

They are also vindicating, said Grann, Percy Fawcett, the explorer who partly inspired Conan Doyle's book The Lost World. Fawcett led an expedition to find the City of Z but the party vanished, bequeathing a mystery.

Many scientists saw the jungle as too harsh to sustain anything but small nomadic tribes. Now it seems the conquistadores who spoke of "cities that glistened in white" were telling the truth. They, however, probably also introduced the diseases that wiped out the native people, leaving the jungle to claim – and hide – all trace of their civilisation.

• This article was amended on Wednesday 6 January 2010. Percy Fawcett's experiences in the Amazon were said to have partly inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's book The Lost World, but Fawcett's disappearance did not, contrary to a suggestion in the original article - he vanished after the book was published. This has been corrected.

The Return of the Dinosaur Age

If you have been following my posts on the apparent reports on the existence of dawn age reptiles scattered around the globe, you know that my principle conjecture is that all such critters are members of the specific ecological niche formed by swamplands. The moment that your thinking goes there, all the limited data and the actual nature of the animals falls cleanly into place. They all are aquatic in nature yet retain the ability to travel extensively on land. They are also likely most active at night in order to avoid been overheated.

The vegetarians can spend their days browsing underwater and maintaining an ambient unchanging temperature, only rarely emerging to get at choice food. The carnivores simply fetch up against a group of drowsing crocodiles in the dark and seize a likely meal before dragging it underwater to a lair.

I now have a number of compelling eyewitness reports for both the Amazon and the Congo in particular and other similar locales to both support the core conjecture but also to support the conjecture that a wide range of such critters are extant today.

The probability associated with the existence of a whole family of dawn age reptiles is no longer zero, and I can assure you, I never thought that I would write such words. In fact the niche is globally pervasive and the ecology so inimical to human penetration that it is avoided by even primitive hunter gatherers. We always had easier game out on the open plains and in the ocean shallows.

That now brings up another issue. A previous post on the Antarctic ice core, established that every 100,000 years or so we swing by Sirius and get bathed in ultraviolet radiation for a thousand years or so. The effect of this is to essentially melt out a large part of the ice caps and add perhaps another couple of hundred feet of sea level. The temperature will rise several degrees on average and that surplus must migrate north.

Far more importantly huge amounts of water will find its way into the atmosphere introducing enough rain to establish tropical conditions almost to the poles themselves. It also means a massive expansion of Amazon tropical rainforest like conditions far to the north. The Mississippi valley, the Sahara, the Outback, the Middle East will all become saturated swamplands fully able to support their own populations of crocodiles.

Mankind will simply migrate up into the hills to avoid the worst while managing tropical agriculture.

The point that this addresses is that this cycle has been in place for millions of years and nicely explains the world wide extent of these critters, while we live in a world in which their particular niche while not small is also limited to tropics and coastal swamps. It is in fact at its lowest ebb for the moment.

It is noteworthy, that before the Pleistocene nonconformity mankind was principally operating on coastal lowlands and in constant confrontation with crocodiles at the least and a whole range of rather large carnivores. The moment you left those lowlands, it in fact got much worse. The size alone made it no contest to confront a saber tooth, a mega lion, or a cave bear. Entering swamps holding hungry theropods and crocodiles was a non starter. I am certain mankind was able to wring out refugia for their safety but the confrontation would never have let up. Once the crustal shift occurred, those populations were shattered and in extremis everywhere opening up the uplands to human occupation.

Thus the Pleistocene Nonconformity allowed mankind to swap out of coastal lowlands that were assuredly malarial crocodile infested swamps of restricted areal extent for continents of climatically stable uplands. A rather good deal you know?

Since I have made the conjecture that this was all put in place by humanity in the first place, it is an obvious extrapolation that they went the extra mile and hunted out the top predators for us.

If you are reading some of this stuff for the first time, I suggest searching the blog for earlier posts on these topics. We have progressed a long way here and are long past initial skepticism which is a bit unfair to a new reader.

Also, we are piecing together an alternate human history that is vastly more compelling than any present explanations that is drawn from the evidence at hand and telling us where to go look for additional evidence. More critically, it is telling us to look.

After all, just how many explorers have penetrated deep swamps in order to run down large critters? The number is in fact shockingly small. It will be difficult today and was almost impossible in the recent past

Biochar Pellets

This posting on biochar is an easy read and more interestingly raises the point that the carbon product is possibly a good product to pelletize. In fact, I would both pelletize the product and then dip it in paraffin to make it easy to handle. It may even be possible to add nutrients at that point depending on the solubility of such in paraffin.

These are commercial considerations that become important if one has a huge feedstock at hand. The paraffin would slow down the degradation of the pellet but that may also be an advantage with many crops such as trees and row crops. If nutrient loaded, an initial breakdown cycle lasting out the season is surely useful and helps set thing up for the next crop.

Again this commentator has fallen for the wood based biochar scenario which is difficult to avoid. In practice, wood needs to be avoided because of unwelcome retention of large scale integrity and real crushing costs.

The source is an unidentified poster on this forum.

http://forums.canadiancontent.net/science-environment/84309-bio-char.html


I wrote this for a bio-pellet maker's forum and thought I would pass it on for you to read.

Char is very easy to make in the bon-fire season. An air tight metal container, with a single airhole, is all you need. But your wood inside seal the can, not the airhole, and place on the bon fire. You will see gases come from the hole as the wood inside chars. When the gases stop coming from the hole plug the hole with a stick and remove the can from the fire to cool overnight with the plugging stick in place. The next day you remove the lid and you will have nice chemical free charcoal for the BBQ and compost pile.

Hello, I am new to the forum and to pellet making altogether really. I am an open researcher of the net at the present time have become interested in many topics I come across. The downfall of the net, for some, is that there so much information, it can boggle the mind.

I ran across the videos put out by the web site on YouTube and decided to pose a question to the site administrator. They still have not gotten back to me, but I think from the posts on the forum you are a pretty busy group - he is likely looking into it.

The newest thing on the 'Save the World' front is Bio-char. I asked if the pellet machine would be able to convert bio-char into a pellet form. I do know that the bio-char can be hand pressed, or screw extruded into briquettes. This is done in many countries around the world. What I think would work the best is the small pellets that your group are making.

I will give a little bit of back ground for my idea. Researchers who have explored the rain forests of the Amazon have come across a soil type which is man-made. They call it 'Terra-Preta' or 'Dark Earth'. I have found out that the soil of the rain forest is not particularly suited to growing vegetation (this surprised me) and the ancient civilizations in the area would treat the soils. These plots of land they are finding today are estimated to be 100's of years old (in terms of last use) and are amazingly fertile as compared to other soils in the immediate area. They only run 4-5 feet in depth and cover the known growing plot area of the period. Today’s natives actually hunt out these plots and sell the fertile soil as an income.

The keys to this fertile soil is a high carbon content and pottery chards. Both materials are very porous in nature. What happens is the nutrients that come to the treated soil gets trapped in the pores of the material and are held there, rather than being washed straight through the soil. These nutrients are then extracted from the material be the root systems of the plants as they grow. As the spaces in the material open up again they are refilled with newly arrived nutrients. This material has proven that it can remain in the soil for 100's of years - as is found in the 'Terra-Preta' plots.

By the way these plots are not isolated to the Amazon they are found around the World in different areas. The thing is that the way they are made - the technique was lost. These plots around the World are being used up and the farmers are running out of nutrient rich natural (organic) soil. Some feel that the burning of the fields in the way to go as it has been done that way for ages. Well, the soil is dying and it working. The soils are being depleted. Plant matter which is made of carbon, takes its building blocks from the soil and therefore the soil is lacking carbon after centuries of use. But, because we had one lazy, or work saving generation, who knows how long ago, we have lost the technique of how to care for the soils.

Tests run in Africa are showing an amazing 500+% increase in crop yields in the first year. They are still using un-organic fertilizers as that is what they thought they needed, but that can change now. Their soil is so bad in some areas that nothing would grow. If any farmer could get a 20% increase in annual yields they would be happy.

The reason that the use of chemicals came into large use was because of the depleted soils. If the chemicals did not wash away (trapped in the carbon for future use) there would be less need in the future. Ideally there would be none needed in the future.

So what are we doing? At present we grow plant material, burn it, and release the carbon into the atmosphere. I don't go for the global warming thing, but do feel it is not a good thing happening. The dirt on my car every day tells me that things are changing for the worse - I didn't see that as a child.

What we can do is grow the plant material, burn a portion of it to covert another portion of the material back into carbon, and put that carbon back into the soil. This cuts emissions to the air (from that aspect of society) to 50% of what it was. Pellets can play a big part in this.

My idea was to convert plant matter to char and the char to pellets. The pellets would be good as they are finding in test fields that the microbes in the soils like to grow in the larger pieces. 'It makes the soil happy' - they have a community of their own. You do not want too large of chunks as that makes the soil difficult to work with. Too small of piece (on surface soil) will be blown away on windy days. The windblown soil may not seem like a big thing, but the carbon has the nutrients now remember. Keep all you can on the fields instead of the forest. If you wish to recarbonize the forest soil, spread it through the forest in your spare time.

It should be said here that the carbon upon introduction to the soil will deplete the soil of nutrients at first. This is the carbon 'charging' itself. The pores of the carbon are filling and will have the nutrients there; it just looks like the nutrients are gone. This is why it is a good idea to pre-charge the carbon before introduction to the soil. Mix it with compost or manure for a couple of weeks and let the pores fill. The nutrients will then be added to the soil with the carbon. This where the pottery chars they find in 'Terra-Preta' come from. They are the holding vessels from the indoor urinals and toilets - charged and stinky they were broken in the fields.

This may not work as far as making pellets from bio-char goes. What about bio-char from pellets. This would be easy to test for you people. You have the machines and the wits to do it. The market is there if you want to sell the end material. Every back-yard composter, in every city will want this stuff.

I hope I wasn't too long winded on this. It is an important topic, especially if you are a rural resident. City dwellers with a green thumb can help, but the rural residents hold a majority of the bio-matter.

For more information Google 'bio-char' also 'making charcoal from wood' you can get into the worm castings and all that, but once the nutrients are in your soil the rest of the good things will come and live there without help.

Permian Extinction Revisit

This is a complete rethink of the nature of the Permian extinction. If correct and it seems likely, then there is immediately no need to look for an astral source as took out the dinosaurs.

More importantly, it has been calculated that 90% to 95% of all marine species became extinct. It is plausible that that was concentrated in the inner sea which was possibly shallow and thus vulnerable to a simple super volcano. Certainly the shallow sea and its surrounds were a natural incubator for speciation not unlike the Amazon today.

Burying the Amazon in ash today would produce exactly the same local statistics.

Thus this extinction event which stood out as a total global wipeout with no convincing explanation is reduced to a massive local event that caught up to the obvious vulnerability of Permian geography. It likely had to happen sooner or later since Pangaea represented the total continental crust at the time.

Again we see one more geological anomaly checked of the old to do list.

Permian Extinction Not A Global Event

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Permian_Extinction_Not_A_Global_Event_999.html

by Staff WritersBoulder CO (SPX) Apr 04, 2009

Understanding the cause of the extinction that wiped out some 95% of the living species at the end of the Palaeozoic Era has been one of the greatest problems in the earth and life sciences.

All explanations so far proposed have been based on global causes. This Special Paper from the Geological Society of America presents a new approach, one that focuses on the supercontinent of Pangea and the life-rich, enclosed oceanic realm, the Paleo-Tethys.

Authors A.M. Celal Sengor and Saniye Atayman of Istanbul Technical University note that the usual approaches to extinction overlook the fact that at the end of the Paleozoic all landmasses were fused together as one giant continent, Pangaea.

The supercontinent's internal ocean, the Paleo-Tethys, included the richest niches in the late Permian world.

According to Sengor and Atayman, the extinctions occurred within and around this ocean, giving the Permian devastation the aspect of a universal extinction.

"What little data we have from the rest of the world indicate that the same extinction did not happen there-except where the surrounding waters were polluted by Palaeo-Tethyan spills."

This book documents the history of the Paleo-Tethys and shows that the Permian extinction was an expected result of the peculiarity of the global geography at that time.

Louis Sheehan on Early Terra Preta

A quick review here on the subject of terra preta and we are sort of due. New information is this tale about confederate soldiers who took up farming on such soils and discovered their value and obviously told the story to a research group.

They pass over the making of the biochar as if it were a simple matter of smoldering wood and brush. If only that were true, everyone would be doing this for thousands of years worldwide.

And no, the microorganisms do not turn organic matter into dark earth. It that were true we all would be living on miles of dark earth. They turn it into food which they consume. In fact, the problem with tropical soils is that it is rapidly degraded by the biology leaving depleted nutrient poor soils. Terra preta intercepts that process and holds the nutrients.

We associate slash and burn with primitive agriculture. That is quit true as far as it goes. What is not understood is that a primitive lifestyle is the result of slash and burn. Slash and burn was not very easy until it was possible to buy a steel axe and a machete.

Thus earlier cultures were static and mastered their soils while building up huge communities.

By Louis Sheehan esquire

Shortly after the U.S. Civil War, a research expedition encountered a group of Confederate expatriates living in Brazil. The refugees had quickly taken to growing sugarcane on plots of earth that were darker and more fertile than the surrounding soil, Cornell University’s Charles Hartt noted in the 1870s.

The same dark earth, terra preta in Portuguese, is now attracting renewed scientific attention for its high productivity, mysterious past, and capacity to store carbon. Researchers on Feb. 18 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis presented evidence that new production of the fertile soil could aid agriculture and limit global greenhouse-gas emissions.

Prehistoric farmers created dark earth, perhaps intentionally, when they worked charcoal and nutrient-rich debris into Amazonian soils, which are naturally poor at holding nutrients. The amendments produced “better nutrient retention and soil fertility,” says soil scientist Johannes Lehmann of Cornell.

Charcoal forms when organic matter smolders, or burns at low temperatures and with limited oxygen. Nutrients such as phosphorus and potassium readily adhere to charcoal, and the combination creates a good habitat for microorganisms. The soil microbes transform the materials into dark earth, says geographer William I. Woods of the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

If some of today’s Amazonian farmers were to use smoldering fires to produce dark earth rather than clear fields with common slash-and-burn methods, they “would not only dramatically improve soil and increase crop production but also could provide a long-term sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide,” says Lehmann.

Slash-and-burn land clearing releases about 97 percent of the carbon that’s in vegetation. Smoldering the same fuel to form charcoal releases only about 50 percent of the original carbon, Lehmann previously reported. The rest of that carbon remains in dark earth for centuries. http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us

However, dark earth requires extra nutrients, such as those in compost. International agreements on greenhouse gases don’t provide financial incentives for farmers to make the effort to create dark earth, Woods says.

Nevertheless, ongoing field experiments in Brazil suggest that the fertility associated with terra preta could provide its own incentive, reports Beáta Madari of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation in Rio de Janeiro.

Brazil contains a wide range of dark earths with varying compositions. The scientists found differences between the soils used for ancient backyard gardens, which received more nutrients, and soils from distant fields.

Farmers of the time “certainly would have immediately learned about the properties of that soil, however [it] formed,” says anthropologist Michael J. Heckenberger of the University of Florida in Gainesville. But the knowledge about how to make dark earth disappeared after contact with Europeans decimated the indigenous population.

National Geographic Airs Documentary on Biochar

This has aired and is worth seeing when you get the chance. Biochar is entering the mainstream and people are now aware everywhere of the potential. Ample experimentation is underway. There is still a lot to be done, but acceptance is now no longer a problem.

As I commented in the very beginning of this emergent story, no one will be able to get past or challenge the thousand year field test in the Amazon. Without that lifetimes would have been wasted. Now everyone knows it works and a decent understanding of why is speeding fresh research.

Of course all the newcomers will have to climb the learning curve, but there is enough data out there, including that on this blog to speed the process. We have already come a long way in eighteen months.

ON TV Lost Cities of the Amazon airs Thursday, November 20, at 9 p.m. ET on the National Geographic Channel.

Centuries-old European explorers' tales of lost cities in the Amazon have long been dismissed by scholars, in part because the region is too infertile to feed a sprawling civilization.

But new discoveries support the idea of an ancient Amazonian urban network—and ingeniously engineered soil may have made it all possible.

(See Ancient Amazon Cities Found; Were Vast Urban Network [August 28, 2008].)

Now scientists are trying to recreate the recipe for the apparently human-made supersoil, which still covers up to 10 percent of the Amazon Basin. Key ingredients included of dirt, charcoal, pottery, human excrement and other waste.

If recreated, the engineered soil could feed the hungry and may even help fight global warming, experts suggest.

Before 1492

Scientists have long thought the river basin's tropical soils were too acidic to grow anything but the hardiest varieties of manioc, a potatolike staple.

But over the past several decades, researchers have discovered tracts of productive terra preta—"dark earth." The human-made soil's chocolaty color contrasts sharply with the region's natural yellowish soils.

Research in the late 1980s was the first to show that charcoal made from slow burns of trees and woody waste is the key ingredient of terra preta.

With the increased level of agriculture made possible by terra preta, ancient Amazonians would have been able to live in one place for long periods of time, said geographer and anthropologist William Woods of the University of Kansas.

"As a result you get social stratification, hierarchy, intertwined settlement systems, very large scale," added Woods, who studies ancient Amazonian settlements.

"And then," he said, "1492 happens." The arrival of Europeans brought disease and warfare that obliterated the ancient Amazonian civilizations and sent the few survivors deep into the rain forest to live as hunter-gatherers.

"It completely changed their way of living," Woods said.

Magic Soil?

Today scientists are racing to tease apart the terra-preta recipe. The special soil has been touted as a way to restore more sustainable farming to the Amazon, feed the world's hungry, and combat global warming.
The terra-preta charcoal, called biochar, attracts certain fungi and microorganisms.

Those tiny life-forms allow the charcoal to absorb and retain nutrients that keep the soil fertile for hundreds of years, said Woods, whose team is among a few trying to identify the crucial microorganisms.

"The materials that go into the terra preta are just part of the story. The living member of it is much more," he said.

For one thing, the microorganisms break up the charcoal into smaller pieces, creating more surface area for nutrients to cling to, Woods said.

Anti-Global-Warming Weapon?

Soil scientist Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University is also racing to recreate terra preta.

The Amazonian dark soils, he said, are hundreds to thousands of years old, yet to this day they retain their nutrients and carbons, which are held mainly by the charcoal.

This suggests that adding biochar could help other regions of the world with acidic soils to increase agricultural yields.

Plus, Lehmann said, biochar could help reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere from the burning of wild lands to create new farm fields.

For example, specialized power plants could char agricultural wastes to generate electricity.

The process would "lock" much carbon that would have otherwise escaped into the atmosphere in the biochar. The biochar could then be put underground, in a new form of terra preta, thereby sequestering the carbon for centuries, Lehmann suggests.

Current Amazonian farming relies heavily on slash-and-burn agriculture—razing forests, then burning all of what's left.

By reverting to the ancient slash-and-char method—burning slowly and then mixing the charcoal into the soil—Amazonian carbon dioxide emissions could be cut nearly in half, according to Woods, of the University of Kansas.

With slash-and-burn, he noted, 95 percent of the carbon stored in a tree is emitted to the atmosphere. Slash-and-char emits about 50 percent, he said.

"The rest is put into different forms of black carbon, most of which are chemically inert for long periods of time—thousands of years."

In addition, the technique would allow many farmers to stay sedentary, Woods said.

Because the soil would apparently remain fertile for centuries, "they don't have to cut down the forest constantly and send it up into the atmosphere," he said.

Can Biochar Paint the World Green?

I add this recent item on Biochar. This will refresh your knowledge on the subject. I have covered it extensively over the past year or so and it is always nice to see another good survey story.

The principle reason this flies is that in the face of the developed world’s regulatory environment and the clear lack of patentability, most protocols like this run into an irresistible headwind. Familiarity with the literature on zeolites and thence solid crystalline acids immediately suggests the use of activated carbon as a soil additive. It certainly did to me yet I backed off for the above reasons.

Because the Amazonian Indios have conducted a field test over thousands of years, the need for extensive field tests just to show feasibility evaporates and we can now study the effects of thousands of years of such practices on such soils.

Thus concern over scientific acceptance may make you look wise but science in the field makes you look like the guy sitting on the cure for cancer.

Can charcoal paint the world green?

A look at the promising future of biochar

by Myles Estey

October 31, 2008

Amidst growing documentation of global warming and its dangers, a simple method of carbon sequestration has been quietly demonstrating potential to play an integral role in the fight against climate change.

Far from the spectacular engineering of most sequestration methods or industrial greenhouse gas (GHG) capture systems, focus instead lies on very simple ingredients: waste organic matter, a kiln and chunks of charcoal. Interest in how this can not only fight climate change, but also soil degradation, soil toxicity and poor crop yields, continues to build rapidly around the world.

This is not your average charcoal. Originally called Terra Preta de Indio (Amazonian Dark Earth, after its region of origin), researchers today tend towards the term “biochar.” The char product derives from a special burning process called pyrolysis, where organic matter is burned in the absence of oxygen at a temperature between 300 and 600 degrees Celsius. Wood chips, crop residues, manure, food wastes: any and all forms of organic matter can be combusted through pyrolysis to similar results.

The anaerobic nature of this burning partially prevents the release of carbon as a gas, instead leaving a residual char that is extremely rich in carbon: the biochar. The differentiating feature in the two breakdown processes is simple.

Typical combustion of organic matter (burning, incineration), releases nearly all of the carbon as carbon dioxide (CO2) the gas which scientists increasingly identify as the root of the climate change problem. Similarly, when organic materials are left to break down naturally, these same products will release methane, a gas with 21 times more global warming potential (GWP) than CO2 which again fuels the climate change feedback loop. Pyrolysis burning ensures much of the carbon stays as a solid, thus not releasing it into the atmosphere as a gas.

The pyrolysis kilns – which can range from the size of a fist to an industrial facility - have yet another added feature that help mitigate the effects of climate change. Many are designed to harness the heat of the kiln to assist in generating the facility where they are stationed. In other words, while biomass gets treated in a carbon-responsible manner, it simultaneously diminishes the need to draw more power from the grid, which has associated emissions of its own, an added step of efficiency.

Within the actual pyrolysis process, instead of emitting the majority of carbon as gas, the nature of the anaerobic burning permits roughly 50 per cent of the carbon in the combusted product to end up as the carbon-rich biochar. The promising aspect here is that carbon is stable in this state. It can be buried safely in the ground, where it breaks down on the scale of hundreds to thousands of years, boosting soil health while doing so.

As Cornell professor Johannes Lehman – among the more prolific and respected researchers on the topic – writes in the article “Bio-energy in the Black”, the buried biochar has two main attractive features: “a high stability against decay and [a] superior ability to retain nutrients as compared to other forms of soil matter.” This means that as the carbon breaks down in the ground, it makes positive contributions to the soil health. Initial research has shown definitive potential for the char to boost crop yields, reduce soil degradation and offset the presence of dangerous chemicals that have ended up in soil - all fairly high accolades for little pieces of charcoal.

Despite the promising functions of biochar, research on the modern applications of biochar remains in the embryonic phase. To date, all that has been determined is there is enough potential for biochar to warrant further study. Initial observations of how well char has acted when put in soil, and how safe the char is as a carbon storage mechanism, has been a major boon to the burgeoning interest in the topic. Similarly positive results yielded from climate models calculating the extent to which pyrolysis methods of combusting biomass can prevent the release of CO2 into the atmosphere are further propping up interest in pursuing the practice.

With optimistic initial findings, claims have emerged that state even modest application of biochar systems could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 10 per cent, that biochar will be the wedge to avert climate change disaster or that biochar will help arrest the onslaught of desertification and topsoil depletion.

Professor Lehman, though himself an ardent believer in the worth of biochar, is insistent that much more research needs to be done to determine exactly what role biochar can play in helping society work towards a healthier planet before definitive claims can be made.

“We need to evaluate the biochar potential at the scale that it needs to be implemented, with solid accompaniment by research to evaluate both its benefits and potential problems,” explains Lehmann. He adds with some chagrin that the money needed to move forward is a drop in the bucket compared to U.S. research money backing biofuel and other carbon sequestration projects.

“I think the technology is at our fingertips,” Lehmann furthers, “if we could just get a few million [in funding] it would make a huge contribution to our understanding.”

Beyond understanding how it will all work scientifically on the larger scale, more also must be done to understand how biochar can work from an economic and policy standpoint. No matter how ecologically beneficial biochar may prove to be, it will go nowhere without industry backing.

Peter Fransham - the Vice President of Technology at Advanced BioRefinery Inc. (ABRI), an Ottawa-based company that works with pyrolysis - is well aware of this. Peter has the unique position of having worked in the small industry for 20 years, a veritable eternity in this young field. Even today, ABRI remains one of only four or five Canadian companies dealing with pyrolysis or biochar.

Fransham believes any decisions to invest in biochar will come down to simple cost analysis: will it bring sufficient financial benefit to those who use it? He offers the sample question of “what is the increase in yields that one will obtain from putting [char] into the field, and how long is the payback for that [individual]?” Being able to answer this question accurately will be crucial to biochar’s direction from here.

“At this point, we don’t really have the numbers to say what the payback is going to be. And that’s where the academic community comes in, to help determine these rates,” Fransham adds. “Can we put this in at this rate, and have this improvement, and generate a positive rate of return for the farmer?” Accurate answers to this question still hang in the balance, and Fransham underlines that determining actual dollar figures on the costs and benefits will be a prerequisite for an industry to grow around the technology.

These steps are being taken, however slowly, and far removed from the limelight. ABRI’s understanding of how the biochar process can work continues to develop in concert with others around the world. Joint research projects in both Canada and the U.S. continue to fuel ABRI with more information about how their two main biomass interests - poultry manure and wood chips - can be reduced through pyrolysis, and used as a marketable product.

Positives outweigh the negatives for Fransham and his company these days, but as he says of any long term success, “biochar has to prove this is something we have to do today, as well as in the future” in order to really flourish.

Lehmann and the academic community around biochar are hoping to do just this. Far more so than Fransham, Lehmann speaks with excitement of the potential for biochar not as a business, but as a means to fight climate change, boost crop yields and enrich soil quality. And it is in these latter three points that most of Lehmann’s work focuses, hoping to find that we may have a way to help us steer off our crash course to a climatic disaster.

However, Lehmann speaks firmly on the fact that biochar will never be the sole answer to curbing global warming. Such a goal, he reminds, will only be realized by reducing the high dependence on GHG-producing energy we see today. He cautions that it is an illusion to think that biochar is a magic solution, instead emphasizing that it can “play a significant role in a portfolio of options” to fight climate change, if done properly. He adds, “it may be the only option that we have right now, today, that can actually have a net withdrawal of CO2 from the atmosphere in a safe and environmentally conscious way.”

This, of course, is hugely important news for anyone even remotely concerned with our planet’s health.

The fact that biochar can conceivably remove CO2 from the atmosphere and make an end product that has its own set of benefits is certainly compelling, to say the least, and more than worthy of the research Lehmann, Fransham and their peers advocate.

If it is even half of what some have predicted, everything from timber mills in the Canadian north, to Australian farms plagued by arid ground, to African villages that rely on dangerous or inefficient combusting methods, to mega-farms in the American northwest could be reaping the benefits of biochar and revolutionizing how we deal with our organic waste. And all the while bringing our atmospheric CO2 to more stable levels.

If research heads in the direction many are hoping it will, there may be a chance yet for charcoal to do something few would have ever guessed of it: make our world a greener place.

Alternative History of the Holocene.

As my readers know, I am presenting an alternative history of the Holocene that is radically different than that ascribed to by everyone else. It is my expectation that this alternative history will require much of a generation to pass before it is actually accepted into the mainstream.

Fifteen years ago, it was very obvious to me that the Pacific coastal route was a major highway for human migration into the Americas. I live there, after all. It is only now that we are seeing rising acceptance of this idea. Also, the archeologists are now digging deeper than the Clovis record and are actually finding the necessary evidence.

Let us discuss the idea of archeological evidence. One of the poorly understood aspects of such evidence is the input distribution curve. Modest reflection tells us that the input curve is not very likely to match the output curve. What does this mean? It means that a culture can occupy a river valley for 10,000 years and that all evidence of their passing will be recycled by the meandering river bed for the duration leaving only a scattered location or two to interpret. A sampling of this remaining evidence cannot be expected to tell us very much at all about the real history of this occupation and most critically, the fall off in evidence as we retreat in time is naturally precipitous.

We have the example of Monte Verde which is telling us that humanity was in all the Americas for most of 50,000 years. And why not? Our problem is that we have only one or two such sites, while we have many more recent sites. But this is to be expected. What is important is to confirm the antiquity of mankind in the Americas or ignore every piece of cracked stone that may be a human artifact in the Americas while accepting such in the rest of the world.

We now have the important Topper site in North Carolina receiving the same treatment. It is already a very important Clovis site that confirms the meteoric extinction event of 12900 BCE. It also revealed much deeper strata that gave up radiocarbon readings of 50,000 years for charcoal associated with apparent human occupation.

I have had my eyes open for evidence of this nature for many years and it is nice to see it been slowly dug up. And let us not blame the archeologists for a lack of insight. They were far too few and had far too much reputation vested in bad ideas for this to be easily changed. And everyone wants that scant piece of evidence interpreted.

When I reconstructed Bronze Age mathematics, I understood that the measuring stick used by builders of the pyramids needed to have specific marks on the back. When one of these sticks became available for me to inspect, I was electrified to find those marks exactly were they should be.

The same was true when it was revealed that the Paleolithic coastal natives of Eastern Siberia had the best developed upper bodies ever seen for their kayaks.

These alternative historical interpretations continue to accrete new and compelling evidence. They are clearly not bad ideas.

Returning to the Holocene, we have a world utterly changed by the 12900 BCE crustal shift. Prior to this event, the temperate zone was locked in a climate regime that was dominated by the polar ice caps and produced temperature ranges much broader than to day and inimical to any form of stable crop production. It could only support a hunter gatherer society.

The regions of the world that could have evolved an antique civilization were constrained to SE Asia, India, Africa and the Amazon. So far though, our evidence is strictly Paleolithic from typically highland regions. Since modern humanity arose around 70,000 years ago and had sixty thousand years to establish antique civilizations not unlike those of the Maya and Mesopotamia in any convenient river bottom, it is a good surmise that these were all obliterated in 12900 BCE and their littorals flooded out as the sea levels rose from melting ice.

There is no evidence whatsoever to suppose that such a hypothetical population achieved a culture any more sophisticated than that of an advanced stone and wood based society. This is assured by the pervasiveness of surrounding Paleolithic culture.

After the event known as the Pleistocene nonconformity, the temperate zone became hospitable with the removal of the Northern ice Cap with the concomitant 300 foot sea rise and has continued hospitable to this day. The only anomalies of mention are the drop in global heat content caused by mankind’s denuding of the Sahara and the occasional nasty 1159 BCE blip produced by the likes of Hekla.

Such blips are typically volcanic in origin and Hekla’s lasted a full twenty years. The unrecognized consequence of such an event is the establishment of a huge amount of multi year ice in the high Arctic. This sea ice is only removed very slowly in the years that follow. There is good reason to suggest that the consequence of the little ice age was a slow recovery that has lasted two hundred years and only now is showing signs of fully abating.

Thus revegetating the Sahara and the Middle East is a priority to finish the job that nature is trying to complete and protect. The added global heat will allow us to recover far more quickly from the next Hekla style event. And the crust will never move again unless plate tectonics shifts Antarctica fifteen degrees or lifts the Arctic sea bed starting a new ice cap. By then we should have terraformed Venus and not care too much.

I have roughly sketched a history that included ample Bronze Age trading ending abruptly with Hekla and most certainly saw the rise and fall of many organized cultures. Many of those cultures left no stonework to mark their passing. In the Amazon we have a unique man made soil to indicate a population of millions. Without that there is nothing. We will find it necessary to err on the side of the large populations wherever possible.

Earthen Terra Preta Kilns and Pollen Spectrum

I am reposting this article by David Bennet with Lehmann on Terra Preta in 2005. This reconfirms the most critical information as well as describes the original scope of the Amazonian Indian civilization itself.

Again this lays out the limiting factors and fully supports my earthen kiln conjecture.

Firstly, the maize or corn exists in an environment that mitigated against its use for purely food production. There were alternatives far better suited to the non terra preta environment, starting immediately with manioc which is a rainforest friendly plant.

Secondly, the only viable source of meat protein to these peoples at this population density was fish. Without confirmation, a pond with tilapia makes great sense. The waste from the daily meal could be readily folded into any growing seed hill. Human waste could simply have been buried in the field itself avoiding any storage. This is common practice to this day.

The making of the earthen kiln is no more difficult than uprooting the dehydrated corn stalks and properly stacking them to form an earthen walled kiln with a wall thickness of two to three root pads and an interior of tightly packed corn stalks. Obviously, any other plant material, including wood can be built into the stack as available. The earthen wall nicely restricts air flow during the burn phase and lends itself to optimization by changing the thickness. It also minimizes the amount of human effort needed which is through the roof if you are attempting to cover a pile of stubble or branches.

This gives you a kiln with vertical earthen walls and a possibly domed top that can be easily covered with earth. Again, field trials will optimize this protocol very easily. The kiln could be squared of or perhaps even circular though unlikely. The only tool to this point is a strong back or two. We have gathered several tons of corn stover over perhaps an acre of land with only a little more effort than that required to clear the field and burn the waste.

Now we must fire the kiln. The easy way is to take a clay lined old basket and fill it up with coals from a wood fire. Carry this ember charge to the center of the kiln top and tip the charge onto the exposed center and place the basket as a cap to the newly forming chimney. More clay may be necessary to widen the chimney cap. Throw more earth on top of this to prevent breakout of the fire. Keep growing earth on any breakout points that start. The chimney will serve to burn all the volatiles produced as the hot zone expands to fill the collapsing kiln until they are exhausted. Thereupon the hot zone will cool off leaving a blend of biochar, ash and earth and some root ends for the next kiln. And yes, we should have a lot of fired clay.

The biochar itself will be a range of nonvolatile combustion products that will range from even dried vegetation to activated charcoal following a nice bell curve. The material can be then gathered in baskets and redistributed into the field onto the seed hills again reducing wastage and effort.

I realized originally that the only ancient plant that could accommodate a high enough volume of terra preta production was good old maize. It just seemed an unlikely option for tropical rainforests. That is when I started looking for references to the pollen record. The article by David Bennett and Lehmann is one of those reverences that then emerged.

I would like to get a full spectrum of the pollen profile since it seems very likely that while the fence rows held the food trees, it seems more likely that they also used a variation of the three sisters using some form of convenient legume. Squashes also, of course, but not nearly as important.

The key point of all this is that a family can convert a field into terra preta in one short season, allowing them to repeat the process thereafter as necessary until the field is completely transformed to depth. Today, we can do the same thing using shovels and a garbage can lid.

Terra preta: unearthing an agricultural goldmine

Nov 14, 2005 10:36 AM, By David Bennett

Many soil scientists insist an ancient Amerindian agrarian society will soon make a huge impact on the modern world. They say once the intricacies and formulation of the society’s “terra preta” (dark earth) is unlocked, the benefits will help stop environmental degradation and bring fertility to depleted soils. Developing and developed nations will benefit.

Orellana

The story goes that in 1542, while exploring the Amazon Basin near Ecuador in search of El Dorado, Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana began checking the area around one of the Amazon’s largest rivers, the Rio Negro. While he never found the legendary City of Gold, upon his return to Spain, Orellana reported the jungle area held an ancient civilization — a farming people, many villages and even massive, walled cities.

Later explorers and missionaries were unable to confirm Orellana’s reports. They said the cities weren’t there and only hunter-gatherer tribes roamed the jungles. Orellana’s claims were dismissed as myth.

Scientists who later considered Orellana’s claims agreed with the negative assessments. The key problem, they said, was large societies need much food, something Amazonia’s poor soils are simply incapable of producing. And without agriculture, large groups of people are unable to escape a nomadic existence, much less build cities.

Dark earth

More recently, though, Orellana’s supposed myths have evolved into distinct possibilities. The key part of the puzzle has to do with terra preta.

It turns out that vast patches of the mysterious, richly fertile, man-made soil can be found throughout Amazonia. Through plot work, researchers claim terra preta can increase yields 350 percent over adjacent, nutrient-leached soils.

Many well-respected researchers now say terra preta, most of it still hidden under jungle canopy, could have sustained large, agronomic societies throughout Brazil and neighboring countries.

Amazing properties

The properties of terra preta are amazing. Even thousands of years after creation, the soil remains fertile without need for any added fertilizer. For those living in Amazonia, terra preta is increasingly sought out as a commodity. Truckloads of the dark earth are often carted off and sold like potting soil.

Chock-full of charcoal, the soil is often several meters deep. It holds nutrients extremely well and seems to contain a microbial mix especially suited to agriculture.

Thus far, despite great effort, scientists have been unable to duplicate production of the soil. If researchers can ever uncover the Amerindians’ terra preta cocktail recipe, it will help stop the environmentally devastating practice of slash-and-burn agriculture in the Amazon jungle. Terra preta’s benefits will also be exported across the globe.

However, even without unlocking all of the soil’s secrets, things learned in the study of it are already being brought to row-crop fields.

Among researchers studying terra preta is Johannes Lehmann, a soil fertility management expert and soil biogeochemistry professor at Cornell University. Lehmann, who recently spoke with Delta Farm Press, says things learned from terra preta will help farmers with agricultural run-off, sustained fertility and input costs. Among his comments:

On how Lehmann came to terra preta research…

“I spent three years living and working in degraded Amazonia field sites. Inevitably, if you work in the central Amazon, you come across terra preta.

“The visual impact of these soils is amazing. Usually, the soils there are yellow-whitish colored with very little humus. But the terra preta is often 1 or 2 meters deep with rich, dark color. It’s unmistakable. We know terra preta are preferentially cropped.”

On the various properties of terra preta and its modes of action…

“There are a few factors that contribute to this fertility — sustainable fertility. Remember, these are soils that were created 1,000 to 5,000 years ago and were abandoned hundreds or thousands of years ago. Yet, over all those hundreds of years, the soils retain their high fertility in an environment with high decomposition, humidity and temperatures. In this environment, according to text books, this soil shouldn’t exist.

“That alone is fascinating for us.

“Among the most important properties are high nutrient concentrations (especially for calcium and phosphorus). Most likely, this is linked to a unique utilization of agricultural and fishery waste products.

“We believe that fish residues are an important portion of the high phosphorus concentrations. Phosphorus is really the number one limiting nutrient in the central Amazon.

“Another interesting aspect of terra preta’s high fertility is the char (charcoal) content of the soil. This was deliberately put into the soil by the Indians and doesn’t only create a higher organic matter — and therefore higher fertility through better nutrient-retention capacity — but this special type of carbon is more efficient in creating these properties.

“You can have the same amount of carbon in terra preta and adjacent soils and the infertile soil won’t change. Terra preta’s abilities don’t just rely on more carbon, but the fact that its char and humus is somehow more efficient in creating beneficial properties. That’s the truly unique aspect.”

Having lived in the Amazon and studied it, how much terra preta does Lehmann believe there is?

“There are no precise numbers of how much terra preta there is (in Amazonia). No one has done any large-scale investigation of that. It’s very difficult to find out in the Amazon’s jungle environment. Suitable remote-sensing techniques haven’t yet been used.

“So (the 10 percent) estimates sometimes cited are crude extrapolations from the few areas we’re familiar with. But we know that in familiar areas there are huge patches of terra preta. These are hundreds of hectares large. When there have been maps produced of areas containing terra preta — say an area around a stream — patches are everywhere.

“It is also true that terra preta is widespread. Almost anywhere in the central Amazon, you can step out of the car and ask a local ‘Is there any terra preta around?’ and they’ll show you. It’s everywhere.”

What were the Indians growing? Tree crops? Row crops?

“There has been some pollen analysis. It suggests manioc and maize were being grown 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. In the pollen bank, these crops didn’t pop up sporadically but in large numbers.

“But all kinds of crops were grown by the Indians. Palm trees, under-story fruit trees, Brazil nut trees — all were very important.”

On the differences between slash-and-burn and slash-and-char agriculture…

“We have very good indications that the Amerindian populations couldn’t have practiced slash-and-burn and created these soils.

“It’s also highly unlikely that a population relying on stone axes would have practiced slash-and-burn anyway. The normal soils are so poor that with a single slash-and-burn event, you can only crop without fertilizer for two years at most. Then the soil has to be left fallow again.

“Primary forest trees have a diameter of 2 or 3 meters. If all you had was a stone ax in your hand, you’d find a different way to deal with agriculture than felling these huge trees every two years.

“The difference between (the two systems) is the slash-and-char wouldn’t burn in an open fire. Charcoal would be produced under partial exclusion of oxygen. We envision that happening by natives covering up piled up logs with dirt and straw. These charcoal-making systems are still being used around the world.”

How close are researchers to duplicating terra preta?

“We’re working intensively. We don’t need to take any terra preta anywhere. What we want to do is become knowledgeable about how terra preta was created and then create it elsewhere with local resources.

“Research on this is ongoing in Columbia, in Kenya. I have research colleagues in Japan and Indonesia also working on this. At the moment, there is a lot of excitement but there’s a lot of work to do.”

How terra preta could help industrialized countries…

“We envision systems based on some of the principles of terra preta. And this isn’t just for tropical agriculture. This could be very important for U.S. agriculture.

“Terra Preta could mean a reduction in environmental pollution. What works as a retaining mechanism in Amazonia could work in the United States where there are concerns of phosphates and nitrates entering groundwater and streams. We have only begun to realize the potential of how this could reduce pollution in industrialized countries.

“Luckily the principles of creating bio-char soils will be very similar no matter what area of the world you’re in. Results obtained in Brazil will be pertinent for the United States.

“In terms of widespread adoption, it’s still some way away. There are still knowledge gaps. For instance, we know there are important differences in the effects of bio-char on soil fertility depending on what material you use and what temperature and under what conditions the char is produced. That’s something we should be able to resolve within a year or two. Once that’s done, we can take the systems to Extension Services around the world and make larger scale, on-farm research plots.

“We’re already working with dozens of Kenyan farmers on this. The project only began this year. By next year, we hope to have a better idea of how this works on farms.”

Where will the bio-char come from?

“Perhaps agricultural and forestry waste products could be the answer.

“Something else that gets us very excited is a link to energy production systems (utilizing) pyrolysis...

“Really, pyrolysis is a just a complicated word for making charcoal. Prototypes of this system for commercial power plants have been developed. These create bio-oil, hydrogen and other co-products — including bio-char — from the production of charcoal.

“We want to gain a better understanding of what effects this bio-char has on soil functions. It should be quite similar to a bio-char produced in a kiln or field. Such a system will be an entry point for large-scale production and use.

“There are competing uses for the power plant byproducts. Currently, power plants either use the byproducts for their own energy needs or they sell it to be used as charcoal briquettes.

“It could become profitable as soon as some of the environmental effects — currently external — are internalized. For instance, cleaner streams, cleaner groundwater, carbon sequestration and other things.”

For more information, visit www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/terra_preta/TerraPretahome.htm

Early Terra Preta Production

As my long time blog readers know, terra preta is a man made soil located in the Amazon by the Indians up to the time of the conquest for at least a thousand years. Besides the substantial 15% content of powdered charcoal we have an additional persuasive content of apparent broken pottery shards throughout.

The Indians were able to produce powdered charcoal while consuming a lot of low grade pottery in the process. This is many tons of charcoal per acre. The manufactured soil retains fertility without significant assistance in an environment were its only competitor is low productivity slash and burn. High density settlement resulted and was almost certainly responsible for the legends of El Dorado. The Spaniards were about a generation too late and the knowledge was lost.]

Reconstructing the production protocol was tricky but is is really very simple.

It was and still is impossible to use wood economically to produce the powdered charcoal. I say impossible because the direct costs of harvesting wood is well known and the cost of producing charcoal is also well known. That implies that wood charcoal which also has to be fine ground must have a cost base approaching that of sawn wood. The sunk cost is far too high to ever use as a soil additive. This is borne out even in Africa were we see charcoal been made to take advantage of its direct cash value as fuel.

That leaves us with dry crop residue as a source material and a very productive one to boot. In the time and place, and this is almost still true today, the only crop that fitted the volume need to make the process practical is and was corn. Today bagasse could also be used. The important factor is tonnage per acre. Corn is good for ten tons per acre. Most other crops simply fail to produce enough plant material. Additionally, corn waste or stover must be removed and burned regardless.

Since it must be gathered and burned in any event, the question is how to convert this feedstock into a ton or two of powdered charcoal or more reasonably into biochar retaining both the charcoal content and some remaining plant material.

Here, the nature of the corn root itself helps out hugely. It form a flat disc, not unlike the base of a floor lamp. This dirt ball can be treated almost like a brick. It permits the building of tightly packed stacks whose outer wall is formed be tightly packed root discs loaded with mud. It is no big trick to build a vertical wall of these root discs to act as the outer shell of what is a temporary earthen kiln. It was actually a brilliant innovation by some Indian a couple of thousands of years ago.

This earthen kiln is then fired by the process of dumping a charge of glowing wood coals on the top of the stack, directly into the packed dry corn stalks, and covering it immediately with the sun dried earthen platter that carried the coals. You would then cover the top with additional dirt to maintain the integrity of the earthen kiln and let the coals do their work.

The coals will drive a chimney into the stack and all the combustion will take place inside the covered chimney. This nicely minimizes any unnecessary energy loss and maximizes combustion which goes into reducing the balance of the stover. The earthen wall even filters out any errant heavy gases as they try to escape. I suspect that it is only with the recycled gas systems of today that we can do better.

This task would be done after the corn had fully ripened and dehydrated which occurs just after harvest. The corn stalks dry out then and are still pretty impervious to wetting by rain.

Once the burn is complete the next day, one would rake out any unburned roots to throw into the next kiln and then take baskets of the soil - charcoal mixture back into the field to produce the hills for the next crop. The only tool used would be the earthen ware pottery and a strong back. Today I would use a metal garbage can lid.

This process produces enough material to salvage the field in tropical conditions for an immediate crop during the next season. Once this was understood, it became practice and was intensively employed long past its actual necessity for many thousands of acres in the Amazon.

When I first made this hypothesis on the likely protocol, I did a literature search of the Archeological data on the Terra Preta soils looking for the pollen data. Remember that corn is not your first choice of a crop plant on a rain forest soil. I was gratified to discover that the two principal crops were corn and cassava which also produces a lot of biomass but no usable root ball. This confirmed that the protocol had legs.

I am quite prepared to work with someone who wishes to run field tests at no charge since I personally think that this will revolutionize all subsistence farming generally as they can be the first adopters. Larger acreages will need kiln equipment at the least and this will be capital intensive.

And it would be great to get this going where the crop cycle is currently multiple years through slash and burn. I think particularly of the Philippines were I have had fifteen year fallow periods reported. The same must be true for a lot of land in Africa and elsewhere. The more interesting question is the fertility increases in soils now been exploited.

Subsistence Charcoal

I must say that the terra preta group on bionet.org has continued to steadily increase its traffic. I have recently been bombarded with nearly 40 messages a day and I have over 1000 messages that have gone unread. Most of the action has been around various efforts to pursue aspects of pyrolysis in a modern setting.

I have seen no alternative to the corn culture earthen kiln approach that I have proposed a few months back.

Since then we have seen film on the production of subsistence charcoal in Africa and it is very instructive. Firstly, in the modern world, everyone can get their hands on an axe and a simple saw. This makes it easy to hack everything down and to cut it up. Making this woody waste into charcoal is quite another matter.

It fails to pack well but the charcoalers are still able to create pits and to throw dirt on the burning pile to suppress the flames. This obviously will produce some charcoal, but the yield must be terrible. what is clear though is that the produced wood charcoal is poorly charcoaled at best. We see people carrying bundles of charred sticks and bulky bags of char. It makes great fuel. It is almost impossible to use as a soil additive.

Whatever lingering thoughts that I may have had in support of the charcoaling of wood for soil remediation can be laid to rest. Only a modern industrial grade charcoaler might be able to produce suitable material.

Subsistence farmers could not even begin to make wood waste work for them. They needed a helper crop. That was provided in the form of corn to the Amazon Indians.

I also think that wood charcoal was always too valuable as a fuel as is true today in Africa, to ever be crushed and folded into the seedbed. In fact a man load of charcoal probably weighs a hundred pounds and needs be carried miles back to town. That one hundred pounds needed about one ton of source material to be cut down and stacked and covered with dirt while burning. Maybe they did twice as good in terms of yield. However it worked, that man load of charcoal took two days of labor input at the least.

There is simply no way that such a production model could be used to produce terra preta. And the Indians did not have steel tools.