Global fragmentation of ecosystems and changing patterns of rainfall have increased the risk of diseases spreading to humans from animals, mosquitoes and ticks, finds a study co-led by a University College London (UCL) researcher.

In a discovery as broad and far-reaching as the Big Muddy itself, a new, Yale-led study says farmers along the Mississippi River Basin are storing more carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the soil than they are emitting when they add limestone to their fields, an agricultural practice known as “liming.”

It’s a finding that carries major implications for agricultural soil management in the American heartland and around the world — and points to more than a century of data showing the effectiveness of removing CO₂ from the atmosphere by adding crushed carbonate rock to agricultural soil.

“One of the exciting things about this result is that it aligns climate action with something that is already good for farmers,” said Tim Jesper Suhrhoff, a geochemist at Yale and first author of the new study, published in the journal Nature. Suhrhoff is a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture.