A Washington State University Vancouver professor’s research has revealed the scale of carbon locked in the Earth’s surface soils and potentially found insight into possible means to capture that carbon to fight global climate change. Marc Kramer, an associate environmental chemistry professor at WSU, and Oliver Chadwick, a soil scientist at the University of California Santa Barbara, spent five years taking and testing soil samples around the world for their latest study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The two analyzed soil data taken from the Americas, New Caledonia, Indonesia and Europe, along with 6-foot deep soil samples from more than 65 sites, through the National Science Foundation’s National Ecological Observatory Network. Rainfall, they found, takes carbon in the environment and rinses it through soils, where it interacts and bonds with minerals in the soil. “The way to look at this is a global pathway for how carbon is accumulated in soil,” he said.