“Little was known about the age of tropical trees, because they do not have easily identified annual growth rings. No one had thought these tropical trees could be so old, or that they grow so slowly.”
“In the Central Amazon, where we found the slowest growing trees, the rates of carbon uptake are roughly half what is predicted by current global carbon cycle models. As a result, those models—which are used by scientists to understand how carbon flows through the Earth system—may be overestimating the forests' capacity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.”
