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Among the tricky carnivorous plants, great white shark-killing orca whales, and other remarkable flora and fauna that call South Africa home is a remarkable group of “living rocks.” Called microbialites, these communities are similar to coral reefs and are built up by microbes. These tiny living organisms absorb and release dissolved minerals into more solid rock-like forms. Microbialites are also some of the oldest evidence of life on Earth and can be found in layered, self-sustaining communities called microbial mats.

New research recently published in the journal also finds that these living rocks are not just surviving along South Africa’s coast. They’re thriving. The new study tallies how microbialites take carbon and turn it into fresh layers of calcium carbonate. These structures then use photosynthesis (the same way that plants use the sun to make food) and other chemical processes to absorb that carbon day and night at the same rate as the other microbes living within their microbial community.

According to the study’s authors, the rate at which they use carbon shows the impressive efficiency of these microbial mats, taking the dissolved carbon out of their environment and moving it off into a stable mineral deposit.

“These ancient formations that the textbooks say are nearly extinct are alive and, in some cases, thriving in places you would not expect organisms to survive,” Dr. Rachel Sipler, a study co-author and a marine biogeochemist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, said in a statement. “Instead of finding ancient, slow growing fossils, we’ve found that these structures are made up of robust microbial communities capable of growing quickly under challenging conditions.”

Scientists have long struggled to understand how microbial communities like these interact with their environment. Part of the difficulty is that the data on these interactions comes from the fossilized remains of microbialites, some of which are billions of years old. Fortunately, living microbialites are still widely distributed in salty marine environments around the world.

Sipler and the team also looked at the underlying geochemical processes at play. Over several years, they conducted multiple field expeditions, examining four microbialite systems in southeastern South Africa. Here, calcium-rich hard water seeps out of coastal sand dunes.

“The systems here are growing in some of the harshest and most variable conditions,” Sipler said. “They can dry out one day and grow the next. They have this incredible resiliency that was compelling to understand.”

They found that these systems were rapidly depositing the calcium carbonate, estimating that the structures can grow roughly two inches vertically every year. Surprisingly, they also found that the amount of carbon absorbed during day and night were roughly the same. Since these systems have long been thought to be driven by photosynthesis alone, the team was surprised to find that nighttime uptake rates are as high as during the day. After repeating their experiments several times, the team confirmed that the microbes are using metabolic processes other than photosynthesis to absorb all of that carbon in the absence of sunlight. This is similar to how microbes living in deep-sea vents are able to survive in near total darkness.

Based on daily rates of carbon uptake, the team estimates that these microbialites can absorb the equivalent of about 20 to 25 pounds (nine to 16 kilograms) of carbon dioxide every year per square meter. That would be like an area the size of a tennis court absorbing as much carbon dioxide as three acres or forest every single year. This carbon-absorbing rate makes these microbial systems one of the most efficient biological mechanisms storing carbon long-term observed in nature.

“We’re so trained to look for the expected. If we’re not careful, we’ll train ourselves to not see the unique characteristics that lead to true discovery,” Sipler said. “But we kept going out and kept digging into the data to confirm that the finding wasn’t an artifact of the data but an incredible discovery.”

Additionally, coastal marshes are similar to these microbialites since they can take in carbon at a similar rate. However, marsh microbes put all of that energy into organic matter, which can be easily broken down compared to the more stable, mineral structures in microbialites. Given those differences, the team is investigating how environmental factors and variations in microbes may influence the fate of carbon in different microbial systems.

“If we had just looked at the metabolisms, we would have had one part of the story. If we had just looked at carbon uptake rates, we would have had a different story. It was through a combination of different approaches and strong scientific curiosity that we were able to build this complete story,” Sipler said. “You never know what you’re going to find when you put people from different backgrounds with different perspectives into a new, interesting environment.”

In the run-up to COP30 in Belém, we hosted “Capital, Carbon and Conservation: Investing in Brazil for Net Zero Gains,” a roundtable discussion in association with the Financial Services Committee and the Energy and Decarbonization Committee of the Brazilian Chamber of Commerce in Great Britain.

The session addressed opportunities in carbon credit–generating assets, and the future outlook for Brazil/UK bilateral opportunities in the voluntary carbon market.

The panel discussion was moderated by Simon Davies, entrepreneur and head of the Financial Services Committee at the Brazilian Chamber of Commerce; and featured Ciaran Kelly, CEO of carbon offset provider Go Balance; Alexandre Leite, co-founder and CEO of UK-based climate fintech start-up NaturAll Carbon; and Henry Waite, COO of institutional debt finance software provider Kumo.

Ken Rivlin, A&O Shearman’s co-head of the environmental and climate law group, co-head of the international trade group, and board member, closed the panel with remarks on Brazil’s potential leadership on carbon credits and shifts to U.S. climate policy.

Here is a summary of the key themes.

1. Corporate demand for high-quality voluntary carbon credits today is driven by a mix of compliance, reputation and genuine sustainability commitments.

Compliance and voluntary carbon markets are two routes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The former are mandatory and regulated, driven by legal obligations under government policies such as emissions trading schemes. The latter are optional, enabling participants to buy credits to offset their emissions to meet corporate climate goals such as net zero targets.

Future regulatory frameworks, such as CORSIA (a global market-based carbon market program for international aviation created by the International Civil Aviation Organization to offset emissions growth) and Article 6 of the Paris Agreement (which allows countries to cooperate voluntarily to achieve emission reduction targets by transferring carbon credits) are influencing strategic interest, with trading houses positioning for potential compliance-driven markets.

Currently, most businesses make decisions to purchase carbon credits through their sustainability offices—rather than their treasury teams—thus limiting their scale.

At the same time, our experts also felt that carbon credits must become mandatory for demand to grow significantly. Until then, CFOs and treasury teams are more likely to see them as a potential risk.

2. Buyers are demanding higher quality and more demonstrable impact from carbon credits

Corporate buyers of carbon credits are seeking immediate and tangible climate benefits as well as long-term impact and high-quality partnerships. Due diligence processes are becoming longer and more detailed, even in the case of voluntary credits. Sustainability departments are pushing for quality and longevity, including to protect against reputational risk.

CFOs and finance departments, for their part, are seeking reassurance that they can book credits as an asset. Being able to demonstrate co-benefits (positive outcomes beyond the primary goal of a policy or action, such as improvements to public health, economic growth like job creation), energy security, biodiversity, and community well-being) is a strong selling point here.

3. Successful carbon projects require genuine community buy-in and must deliver tangible co-benefits.

In markets such as Brazil, it is impossible to carry out high-quality, high-integrity climate projects without buy-in from local communities. For example, the Trocano project—which aims to prevent deforestation across 1.3 million hectares of the Amazonas region—is nine times the size of Greater London, and includes 10,700 residents living in 100 different communities.

While achieving buy-in takes longer, following the lead of local people with first-hand knowledge of an area enables providers to deliver solutions to real problems while also developing incentives such as income-generation potential. However, some buyers are focused on targeting the lowest-priced assets that provide the greatest climate impact—which are likely be the cheapest to deliver and therefore not involve as many co-benefits. One route to offer the best co-benefits is to price this element into the carbon itself, which by its nature is more easily measured than environmental benefit.

Some members of the panel felt that buyers should remain focused on the primary goal of reducing emissions, meaning therefore that the community angle is less relevant. However, another highlighted that engaging with communities through nature-based initiatives such as afforestation, reforestation and restoration (ARR) and REDD+ (a framework that financially rewards developing countries for preventing deforestation and forest degradation, with the goal of converting these actions into carbon) offer longer-term benefits than technologies that remove carbon.

4. Quality assurance in carbon credits is complex and time-consuming, requiring robust certification and verification.

To determine the quality and integrity of a carbon credit, it’s important to consider who is promoting the underlying project and which group is certifying it. In Brazil this process is time-consuming, and in the case of agricultural land management (ALM) can take two years from first discussing an opportunity with a farmer until the carbon credit is registered and verified.

The first step is to find out whether the relevant land was part of a native forest in the last ten years—if so, the project cannot proceed. Then the parties must determine whether the project is completely new (a requirement) and would create additionality (a benefit that would not have happened otherwise, or a measure of the value added), given that Brazil is home to a sophisticated agricultural sector.

Once the land, the forest and the process are verified, the project design must be audited and certified before buyers can begin due diligence. From there, it usually takes another 12 months to sell the credit.

5. A lack of standardization and the proliferation of registries are obstacles to scaling the market.

Because of this complexity, it is hard to standardize the process, meaning that only specialist players—or buyers’ clubs (coalitions of companies that pool their resources to purchase carbon removal credits collectively)—may be able to afford to conduct due diligence.

Another perspective is that there are two types of voluntary carbon credits: avoidance (the prevention of new greenhouse gas emissions) and removals (the extraction of existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere), which could each be considered a form of standard. There are various categories of typical avoidance projects, and buying this type of credit tends to be cheaper than purchasing removals. Key to creating demand is providing clarity on quality and price.

The number of verifying bodies, all of which provide different levels of standardization, and the difficulty of transferring from one registry to another, are further obstacles to increased corporate investment in voluntary credits. Additionally, lenders and buyers tend to join a limited number of registries, meaning they can only access the projects listed there.

Northern Trust was highlighted as a registry that may seek to set an industry standard—if successful, this would enable money to flow and bankers to find innovative ways to create products such as credit derivatives and securitization. Following a correction in 2021, more trustworthy methodologies will also contribute to a more functional, pragmatic market—even if this doesn’t deliver the ultimate goal of cross-registry standardization.

6. Technology is improving transparency but must be applied carefully.

Emerging technologies can provide better data, which in turn leads to higher-quality carbon credits. For example, the Brazilian geospatial system has provided extremely accurate deforestation data for ten years, while the European Space Agency is open source and thus more affordable. Developing risk maps would enable buyers to make their own judgement of a project, in addition to using a professional verification report.

Other technologies likely to contribute to standardization include satellites, blockchain and artificial intelligence.

Geospatial technology works better for REDD+ because of the need to monitor, modify, and model carbon, but there is no technology able to measure carbon in the soil. The best strategy is to develop proven methodologies – something that can take years—before trying to run on technology.

7. Order and progress: how Brazil can position itself as a global leader in supply and carbon credits

Many banks are considering funding projects in Brazil, thanks to its well-structured policy frameworks for carbon. The country is also well-positioned to be a leader in the voluntary carbon market because its climate commitments are written into law. Recent high-profile deals—such as the Brazil-UAE climate partnership, the Brazil-California climate agreement, Standard Chartered’s plans to turn rainforest protection into climate finance, and Brazil announcing a USD1 billion investment in a tropical forest facility—provide confidence for financiers and corporates.

It can learn from other jurisdictions by balancing regulatory integrity with market efficiency, maintaining strong enforcement, and ensuring long-term certainty for investors.

8. Despite significant policy headwinds in the U.S., the voluntary carbon market is expected to continue growing globally.

While U.S. carbon markets are facing obstacles amid the federal government’s policy shift on decarbonization, large U.S. companies continue to buy carbon credits, and more than 70% of Fortune 500 companies still invest in offsets. Legal and compliance teams at financial institutions with a presence in the U.S. are navigating how best to enter and remain in emissions credit investments, amid a fragmentation of global environmental and ESG rules.

One potential driver of growth is a U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) report on emissions credit and voluntary trading, which hints at ways to expand the market in a more challenging political climate. It also covered cross-jurisdictional approach to promoting transparency and preventing fraud in carbon investing.

Despite the federal government’s stance, the panel felt that voluntary trading would continue to grow, supported by technological advances and ongoing demand from multinational businesses.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. — December 16, 2025 — LOOM Carbon and independent scientific research institute RTI International today announced a strategic research collaboration. The partnership will enable the scaling of LOOM’s proprietary thermal chemical recycling platform designed to transform non-recycled and hard-to-recycle textile waste into sustainable carbon-neutral materials.

Global textile waste exceeds 92 million tons annually, with recycling rates at less than 15%. This new partnership addresses this fast-growing environmental challenge by advancing a credible pathway to textile circularity.

LOOM Carbon’s process converts mixed and contaminated textiles into high value outputs that can re-enter industrial supply chains, including:

These pathways demonstrate how textile waste can be recycled into durable, circular products rather than being landfilled or incinerated.

“Together with RTI, Loom is demonstrating that blended textile waste can be recycled into valuable resources,” said Kimberly Landry, CEO of LOOM Carbon. “This collaboration moves us from pilot to commercial readiness proving textile waste is a resource, not a liability.”

This project will take place at RTI’s Pilot Xcelerator facility, which helps startups, commercial partners and government-funded teams to scale promising technologies from the lab to real-world applications quickly, affordably and with confidence.

“We are proud to leverage RTI’s world-class Pilot Xcelerator facility as well as our expertise in process engineering and emissions validation to help accelerate a proven, scalable solution to textile waste,” said David C. Dayton, Ph.D., Senior Fellow and Director of Biofuels at RTI International. “Together, we aim to deliver real, sustainable benefits as this technology moves toward commercial deployment.”

The 12-month program will focus on scaling LOOM’s system to process challenging textile waste streams, validating product quality, and preparing for commercial deployment. This will target the processing of millions of tons of textile waste annually in Southeast Asia, Europe, North America and other markets with emerging textile stewardship regulations. Industry partners interested in feedstock supply or offtake agreements are invited to contact LOOM Carbon.

Posted: December 16, 2025

Source: RTI International

South Africa is home to some of the oldest evidence of life on Earth, contained in rocky, often layered outcroppings called microbialites. Like coral reefs, these complex "living rocks" are built up by microbes absorbing and precipitating dissolved minerals into solid formations.

A new study, co-led by researchers at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and Rhodes University, suggests that these microbialites aren't just surviving—they're thriving.

The paper, published in , quantifies how microbialites along the South African coast take up carbon and turn it into fresh layers of calcium carbonate. They show how these structures utilize photosynthesis and chemical processes to absorb carbon day and night, relating those rates for the first time to the genetic makeup of the microbial community.

The findings highlight just how efficient these microbial mats are at removing dissolved carbon from their environment and sequestering it into stable mineral deposits.

"These ancient formations that the textbooks say are nearly extinct are alive and, in some cases, thriving in places you would not expect organisms to survive," said Senior Research Scientist Rachel Sipler, the study's lead author.

"Instead of finding ancient, slow-growing fossils, we've found that these structures are made up of robust microbial communities capable of growing quickly under challenging conditions."

Scientists have struggled to understand how these microbial communities interact with their environment based on data from fossilized remains of microbialites—some of which are billions of years old. Fortunately, living microbialites are still widely distributed.

Inspired by how these mats can produce compounds with direct human use, Sipler and her colleagues aimed to understand the underlying geochemical processes at play in this novel environment. Across several field expeditions over multiple years, the team examined four microbialite systems in southeastern South Africa where calcium-rich hard water seeps out of coastal sand dunes.

"The systems here are growing in some of the harshest and most variable conditions," Sipler said. "They can dry out one day and grow the next. They have this incredible resiliency that was compelling to understand."

The team found that these systems were precipitating calcium carbonate rapidly, estimating that the structures can grow almost two inches vertically every year.

More surprising was the finding of carbon uptake day and night. These systems have long been assumed to be driven solely by photosynthesis, so Sipler says they were surprised to find nighttime uptake rates as high as during the day.

After repeating their experiments several times, the researchers confirmed that the microbes are utilizing metabolic processes other than photosynthesis to absorb carbon in the absence of light, similar to how microbes living in deep-sea vents survive.

Based on daily rates of carbon uptake, the team estimates that these microbialites can absorb the equivalent of nine to 16 kilograms of carbon dioxide every year per square meter. That's like a tennis court-sized area absorbing as much CO₂ every year as three acres of forest, making these systems one of the most efficient biological mechanisms for long-term carbon storage observed in nature.

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"We're so trained to look for the expected. If we're not careful, we'll train ourselves to not see the unique characteristics that lead to true discovery," Sipler said. "But we kept going out and kept digging into the data to confirm that the finding wasn't an artifact of the data but an incredible discovery."

Coastal marshes are similar to microbialites in that they're a microbial mat ecosystem that's been found to take in carbon at a similar rate. Yet, marsh microbes put all of that energy into organic matter, which can be easily broken down compared to stable, mineral structures.

Given those differences, the team is continuing to investigate how environmental factors and variations in microbes present influence the fate of carbon in these different microbial systems, using the interdisciplinary expertise and international perspective of the research team.

"If we had just looked at the metabolisms, we would have had one part of the story. If we had just looked at carbon uptake rates, we would have had a different story. It was through a combination of different approaches and strong scientific curiosity that we were able to build this complete story," Sipler said.

"You never know what you're going to find when you put people from different backgrounds with different perspectives into a new, interesting environment."

More information: Rachel E. Sipler et al, Integration of multiple metabolic pathways supports high rates of carbon precipitation in living microbialites, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-66552-8

Provided by Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences

Field work on South Africa's "living rocks" reveals rapid carbon capture in extreme conditions

illustration only

South Africa preserves some of the oldest traces of life on Earth in rocky, layered formations known as microbialites, which resemble coral reefs but are built by microbes that turn dissolved minerals into solid rock. Along the country's southeastern coast, researchers examined modern microbialites that continue to accrete new layers as calcium-rich groundwater seeps from coastal sand dunes.

An international team led by Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and Rhodes University has now quantified how these living structures absorb carbon and convert it into calcium carbonate. Reporting in Nature Communications, the scientists linked measured carbon uptake rates to the genetic makeup of the microbial community, revealing how these mats use both photosynthesis and other metabolic pathways to fix carbon around the clock.

"These ancient formations that the textbooks say are nearly extinct are alive and, in some cases, thriving in places you would not expect organisms to survive," said Senior Research Scientist Rachel Sipler, the study's lead author. "Instead of finding ancient, slow growing fossils, we've found that these structures are made up of robust microbial communities capable of growing quickly under challenging conditions."

Because fossil microbialites can be billions of years old, scientists have long struggled to reconstruct how the organisms that built them interacted with their environment. The team turned to modern analogues, carrying out multiple field expeditions to four microbialite systems in South Africa's Eastern Cape that are fed by hard, calcium-rich groundwater emerging from dunes.

"The systems here are growing in some of the harshest and most variable conditions," Sipler said. "They can dry out one day and grow the next. They have this incredible resiliency that was compelling to understand."

Measurements showed that these microbialites precipitate calcium carbonate quickly, allowing the structures to extend vertically by nearly two inches per year. The work indicates that living microbialites can build substantial rock mass on human timescales, rather than existing only as slowly accumulating relics.

One of the most striking results was evidence of strong carbon uptake at night. Although these systems were assumed to depend entirely on photosynthesis, repeated experiments demonstrated that nocturnal uptake rates can match daytime levels, indicating that microbes are using non-photosynthetic metabolic pathways to fix carbon in the absence of light, similar to communities at deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

From daily measurements, the researchers estimate that the microbialites absorb the equivalent of nine to 16 kilograms of carbon dioxide per square meter each year. Scaled up, a tennis court-sized patch of microbialites would take up as much CO2 annually as roughly three acres of forest, placing these mats among the most efficient biological systems for long-term carbon storage observed in nature.

"We're so trained to look for the expected. If we're not careful, we'll train ourselves to not see the unique characteristics that lead to true discovery," Sipler said. "But we kept going out and kept digging into the data to confirm that the finding wasn't an artifact of the data but an incredible discovery."

The team is now comparing microbialites with other carbon-rich microbial ecosystems such as coastal marshes, which also take up carbon at comparable rates but store it in organic matter that can be more easily broken down. By contrast, microbialites trap carbon in stable mineral phases, and the researchers are using their combined expertise to explore how environmental conditions and community composition control the eventual fate of carbon in these different systems.

"If we had just looked at the metabolisms, we would have had one part of the story. If we had just looked at carbon uptake rates, we would have had a different story. It was through a combination of different approaches and strong scientific curiosity that we were able to build this complete story," Sipler said. "You never know what you're going to find when you put people from different backgrounds with different perspectives into a new, interesting environment."

The study drew initial support from internal funding at Bigelow Laboratory intended to launch new use-inspired projects. Additional funding came from the South African National Research Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the International Development and Research Centre.

Research Report:Integration of multiple metabolic pathways supports high rates of carbon precipitation in living microbialites

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A new take on carbon capture Boston MA (SPX) Nov 26, 2025 If there was one thing Cameron Halliday SM '19, MBA '22, PhD '22 was exceptional at during the early days of his PhD at MIT, it was producing the same graph over and over again. Unfortunately for Halliday, the graph measured various materials' ability to absorb CO2 at high temperatures over time - and it always pointed down and to the right. That meant the materials lost their ability to capture the molecules responsible for warming our climate. At least Halliday wasn't alone: For many years, rese ... read more