
The humble fig tree can help us in extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by converting it in into stone. All trees remove CO2 from the air and store it in their wood, however as the wood biodegrades the CO2 is released again. Fig trees, on the other hand, combine the CO2 within itself to form stone!
“What was really a surprise, and I’m still kind of reeling from, is that the [calcium carbonate] had really gone far deeper into the wood structures than I expected,” says Rowley, who will present the work at the Goldschmidt Conference in Prague, the Czech Republic, this week. “I expected it to be a superficial process in the cracks and weaknesses within the wood structure.”