At around 56,000 square miles and more than 30 feet deep in places, some patches of the peatlands in Congo’s Central Basin have been accumulating and storing carbon since the late days of Earth’s last major ice age, around 17,000 years ago. Industrializing countries around the world — from Europe and the United States in past centuries to southeast Asia in the 21st century — drained vast areas of peatlands, drying them; this mass conversion of peatland into farmland over the centuries is estimated to have released as much as 250 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 203