Six ways ancient Maya still alter the environment They then compared the age of wax molecules with that of plant fossils deposited with the sediments. The researchers used measurements of radiocarbon, an isotope that decays with time, to determine the age of molecules called plant waxes, which are usually stored in soils for a long time because they become attached to minerals. To investigate these long-term effects, Douglas and his coauthors examined sediment cores extracted from the bottom of three lakes in the Maya Lowlands of southern Mexico and Guatemala. The new study, along with other recently published research, suggests that these reservoirs can change dramatically on timescales spanning centuries or even millennia.

Yet scientists have very little understanding of how soil carbon reservoirs change on timescales longer than a decade or so. Soil is one of the largest storehouses of carbon on Earth, containing at least twice as much carbon as today’s atmosphere.

“But when you look at soil carbon storage, it seems the ecosystem was fundamentally changed and never returned to its original state.” “When you go to this area today, much of it looks like dense, old-growth rainforest,” says Douglas, an assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences at McGill University. What’s most surprising in the new study is that the soils in the region haven’t fully recovered as carbon sinks in over a millennium of reforestation, says McGill University geochemist Peter Douglas, lead author of the new paper. Ancient stone carving of the Maya God Pauahtun, taken at Copan Ruinas, Honduras (Credit: Peter Douglas) Scientists also suspect that deforestation contributed to the mysterious collapse of Mayan civilization more than 1,000 years ago. The Maya began farming around 4,000 years ago, and the spread of agriculture and building of cities eventually led to widespread deforestation and soil erosion, previous research has shown. The new findings, which appears in the journal Nature Geoscience, underscore how important soils and our treatment of them could be in determining future levels of greenhouse gases in the planet’s atmosphere. The Maya civilization’s deforestation decimated carbon reservoirs in the tropical soils of the Yucatán peninsula region long after people abandoned ancient cities and the forests grew back, according to a new study.

What happened to the mayans