Grasses vie for carbon sink crown

You might have heard of seaweed – sweet, sweet seaweed – being suggested as a potential carbon sink. Now it could be about to duke it out with wheat and sorghum as the would-be king of plant-based carbon eating.

According to SMH.com it goes like this:

Grasses such as wheat and sorghum can store large amounts of carbon in microscopic balls of silica, called phytoliths, that form around a plant’s cells as they draw the mineral from the soil, a report in the latest issue of New Scientist says.

When a plant dies, the phytoliths, or plantstones, enter the soil and lock in the carbon for potentially thousands of years, said the Southern Cross University agricultural scientists Leigh Sullivan and Jeff Parr. The next step would be to see if plants that best store carbon in plantstones have higher or lower crop yields and quality.