Russian society has become a dry peat bog, waiting for a spark to ignite it.

(Bog Grevillea) Grevillea acanthifolia subsp.

And those are the peat swamp forests on 20 meters of peat, the largest accumulation of organic material in the world.

Or the bog turtle, needing wet meadows and insects and sunny places.

And these mosses, generated by decomposing, are like peat moss in your garden.

When the peat ignites, the fire can creep beneath the surface and erupt somewhere else, days or weeks later.

It s here, in the peat burning below the forests, where the greatest climate impact from palm production can be seen.

This was also the year of the mud, with the site suffering severe rainfalls which turned the entire site into a muddy bog.

The need to wrestle with macroeconomic policy issues could easily cause talks to bog down and give protectionist lobbies the political ammunition they need.

They grow in acidic soils, with different species in wet acid bog habitats ( K. angustifolia, K. polifolia ) and dry, sandy soils ( K. ericoides, K. latifolia ).

Calla (Bog Arum, Marsh Calla, Wild Calla, and Water arum) is a genus of flowering plant in the family Araceae, containing the single species Calla palustris.

The reason is simple Indonesia s fires aren t your typical forest fires. The ground holds peat dense organic matter in the process of becoming coal.

It turned out he was hired by a Scottish distillery to understand why they were burning so damn much peat to distill the whiskey.

Indonesian aircraft seeded clouds above the fires with 100 tons of salt in hopes of bringing rain to drench fires smoldering in the peat.

My colleague, Jason Peat, who runs this program, tells me it's 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper than the traditional way of doing things.

And, like coal, peat stores massive amounts of carbon, which is released into the atmosphere when the land is burned, cleared, and drained to make way for plantations.

Re wetting peatlands and the restoration of degraded peat forests should be the next step, followed by the creation of early warning systems to detect and control forest fires.

The peat is so carbon rich that if it is buried long enough, say for a million years or so, pressure, time and heat will turn it into coal.

As the incineration of those materials did not produce more harmful emissions than incineration of regular fuels (coal, oil, peat moss) incineration could be carried out without undermining strict health and environment safety requirements.

A few days after I arrived in Riau on Sumatra, as I marched to the jungle to see one of the fires, I looked back at where my footprints sank some 12 inches into the peat and saw smoke rising from my tracks.

When forests are cleared to make way for oil palm plantations, the area is usually burned, and most of Riau s massive fires burn on peat swampy layers of partially decayed vegetation that spreads up to 60 feet deep beneath most of the province s forests.

Researchers estimated that in 2012 nearly 70 percent of the carbon released during the transformation of Sumatran rainforests into palm plantations came from peatlands, a 75 percent increase over their portion of emissions in the 1990s and an indication that palm is increasingly expanding into peat.

To the northwest, and around Mount Ruapehu, between an altitude of 1200 and 1500 m, tussock shrubland and tussock grass covers large areas (around 150 km2), consisting mainly of New Zealand red tussock grass ( Chionochloa rubra ), inaka, curled leaved neinei ( Dracophyllum recurvum ), wire rush ( Empodisma minus ), and bog rush ( Schoenus pauciflorus ), as well as heather and grasses like hard tussock ( Festuca novaezelandiae ) and bluegrass ( Poa colensoi ).