On a snowy night in 2021, four shivering scientists in Michigan set down their shovels and studied a hand-drawn map by flashlight. The map led to a secret location. They traveled in the dark so no one would spy where they were going.
If they dug in the right place, they expected to find a bunch of bottles made of thick glass. They’d been buried side-by-side almost 150 years earlier.
This was no ordinary hidden treasure. It was a science experiment. But not just a regular one of those, either.
In the fall of 1879, botanist William James Beal filled 20 pint-sized bottles with seeds and sand. Every bottle held 50 seeds each from 23 types of weeds. According to Beal’s journal, he had buried the bottles on a “sandy knoll” near the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing. He drew a map of this stash so he could unearth a bottle every five years.
He wanted to answer a simple question: How long can stored seeds still sprout? After all, seeds are alive but dormant. You can plant last year’s tomato seeds to get a new bounty this year.
But is there a cutoff? Do those dormant seeds eventually die or go bad?
That’s not a question you can answer quickly. The buried seeds certainly offer some useful clues. “Turns out,” says David Lowry, we now know those seeds can remain viable for “a long time.” Weed seeds, he says, can outlive the farmers who want them gone. “Some last decades, if not over a century.”
A plant biologist at Michigan State University, Lowry was there on that snowy night in 2021, wondering if they’d ever find Beal’s bottle. He’s among the latest in a long line of scientists who know where the bottles are buried. He’s also the current keeper of Beal’s map.
The lifespan of seeds isn’t the only thing that takes a lot of time and patience to measure. And the Beal seed inspectors aren’t the only scientists in it for the long haul. Long-term experiments have yielded surprising discoveries in biology, ecology, physics and space.
“The time on Earth that you have is sort of just one small slice of time,” says Jennifer Powers. She’s an ecologist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul who runs long-term experiments on trees around the world. Spreading such projects over human lifetimes, she says, can illuminate patterns in nature that we might otherwise miss.
The long and short of it
Some super-long scientific endeavors begin as short-term projects. Designed to last only a few years, they might just keep going.
In 1977, for example, NASA launched its Voyager mission. The agency sent two spacecraft on a one-way trip into space. The twin probes’ five-year mission was to visit Jupiter and Saturn.
They did their job spectacularly. Each sent back detailed images of the rings of Saturn. They also confirmed the existence of volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io. Images of Jupiter showed lightning — the first lightning ever seen beyond Earth.
Visiting these distant worlds, rather than just looking through telescopes, gave scientists new information about the solar system. For the first time, they could study moons beyond our own.
“These tiny pinpoints of light became worlds in their own right,” says Linda Spilker. A planetary scientist who still works on Voyager, she’s based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. That’s in Pasadena, Calif.
But Voyager spacecraft didn’t stop working after they sailed past Saturn. The probes are still beaming important data back to Earth. In 2012, they exited the solar system. Today, they’re scouting out interstellar space.
Recalls Spilker, “No one imagined [in the late ‘70s] that Voyager … would still be flying” almost 50 years later.
Other experiments are built to last. The Guinness World Record for the longest-running lab experiment is held by a peculiar project still going at the University of Queensland, in Australia.
It was started in 1927 by Thomas Parnell, the university’s first physics professor.
He filled a funnel with pitch — the sticky black stuff used to pave roads. Pitch seems solid. For instance, it can be shattered with a hammer. In fact, however, pitch is a thick fluid. Parnell wanted to know how often his glop of pitch would drip.
To find out, he let the pitch cool for three years. Then he cut the funnel open in 1930 and began counting the drips.
Over nearly a century, just nine drops have fallen. To date, no one has ever seen it happen in person.
The most recent drop fell in 2014. Scientists predict the next will fall within a few years. The experiment is housed in a glass case in a building on the campus. Curious? You can watch for it here.
Watching pitch drip might sound even duller than watching paint dry. Parnell originally set it up as a teaching experiment to show his students the high viscosity, or thickness, of pitch. Now, scientists point to it as a demonstration of a natural phenomenon that happens very slowly.
Only time will tell
For other extremely long-term experiments, Mother Nature is the lab. Take a mountain forest in Oregon where ecologists are studying log decay. Designed to run for 200 years, the project is still in its early stages. This experiment kicked off in 1985. That’s when ecologists arranged more than 500 newly cut logs throughout the forest.
Forests are rich with dead wood. It provides homes to animals and stores nutrients such as carbon and nitrogen. Fungi and other breakdown artists eat through tough wood and then repurpose its nutrients. Rotting wood also recycles carbon into the air, which plays a role in Earth’s climate.
While some logs break down quickly, others decay over decades or centuries. So ecologists still have much to learn about how ecosystems go about recycling their dead. This ultra-long experiment on log decomposition could help.
“We know we’ll have to go for at least a century or two to figure out what’s going on,” says Mark Harmon. A forest ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, he organized the experiment. He also ran it until he retired a few years ago.
Harmon knows he won’t see what patterns emerge after 200 years. When the project launched, he had to have some confidence that it would continue even after he left. “Why couldn’t I have faith?” he says.
Early data showed his team that decay rates vary dramatically among species and in different climates. One type of wood in the tropics may vanish in as little as a year. Others in drier areas may remain on the ground for centuries.
There are now dozens of other log-decay projects around the world. Powers at the University of Minnesota runs one in Costa Rica. There are also sites in Alaska, China, Germany and the Netherlands.
Amy Zanne has run decomposition projects in St. Louis and Australia. This microbial ecologist works at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. “Often it’s not one thing that decomposes wood,” she says. Take the dry season in northern Australia. “Without moisture, microbes just don’t do much,” she says. But during this same time, termites in the area swarm in. They steal the wood’s tough lignin to fortify their mounds.
As researchers amass more data, Zanne says, she thinks models of climate change will improve.
What’s normal — and what’s not
Many long-term projects focus on ecosystems — places where living things interact with each other and with their surroundings. A forest ecosystem includes trees, soils and creatures big and small. Some changes happen quickly, as when a tree falls or wildfire rips through. But others, like tree growth and decay, can take decades or centuries.
“Trees are very long-lived,” says Pamela Templer, a biologist at Boston University in Massachusetts. If an ecologist goes into a forest and makes one measurement, they may not know if that data point was unusual or not. “It’s hard to say,” she says. “Was it extreme, or in line with the long-term record?”
Recording data over years or decades or centuries can establish what’s called a baseline. That’s what an ecosystem looks like most of the time. Scientists can then compare new measurements to that baseline to see if they’re unusual.
Templer studies how human impacts such as climate change affect the health and growth of forests. Trees hold 80 percent of all the carbon stored aboveground on Earth. But climate change may affect the way trees store and release carbon — which may, in turn, drive more climate change. Understanding that feedback loop can help scientists better predict Earth’s future.
To investigate this, Templer does experiments at forests around the northeastern United States. One of those sites is the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the mountains of northern New Hampshire. Since the 1960s, scientists have collected data there to learn how the forest changes over long periods of time. “We’re constantly looking at the long-term record for surprises,” says Templer.
In 2012, her team started an experiment to simulate climate change across seasons. They heated the soil in a test plot of land using underground wires. Over the next decade, they watched how trees in the test plot fared, compared with trees in an untouched swath of the forest. The scientists also created a test plot where, every winter, they removed snow. Climate change is reducing the snowpack in northern forests, and this plot was designed to see how less snow would affect tree growth.
The team shared its first results this year. Warmer temperatures boosted tree growth, they observed. Over 10 years, trees on the warmed plot stored 60 percent more carbon than other trees. “That was shocking to us,” Templer says. Trees may adapt to climate change by growing faster and holding on to more carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere.
But without snow, tree roots and soil were damaged by freezing winter temperatures. That cut warmed trees’ extra carbon storage by half. So the combination of warmer temperatures and less snow led to a 30 percent overall increase in carbon storage. “It’s still a net benefit,” Templer says. “That could reduce carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.” It suggests a new way that trees could help slow climate change. And without an experiment that ran for over a decade, scientists never have found it.
A lasting legacy
When a scientist sets up a study that will last longer than their own lifetime, they have to trust that someone else will keep it going. That can be a risk. “The problem with long-term experiments is that someone may set them up, but if there’s no follow through, then it can’t continue,” says Lowry, in Michigan.
While he was working on the Beal Seed Experiment, Lowry heard rumors of another, older seed experiment that had been started at Ohio University in Athens. “It’s reported to be done, but there’s no record of it afterwards,” he says. No one knows if bottles are buried somewhere on the college campus, and any discoveries scientists may have made are lost.
But the Beal Seed Experiment has continued. Beal left the experiment in 1915 and asked another scientist to take over. It’s not clear if Beal thought the project would continue so long, Lowry says. “I think he thought he would learn a lot of it during his lifetime.”
By 1920, the seeds were still sprouting, so Beal’s successor switched things up. Instead of digging up a bottle every five years, they did it every 10 years. In 1980, scientists extended the time between bottles to 20 years. Most of the seeds stopped sprouting in the first six decades of being buried. But many continued to sprout, time after time.
Lowry didn’t join the project until 2016. At the time, plant biologist Frank Telewski was the eighth keeper of the map — and the only one who had it. After one of his colleagues died unexpectedly, he wanted to make sure the project would continue if something happened to him.
“He told me, ‘Here’s the map in case I have a heart attack or something.’ He was joking around,” Lowry says. “And then the next month he had a stroke.”
Telewski recovered, but it was a wake-up call. “More people than just one person should have the map,” Lowry says. Now, four people all have access to the map.
On that snowy night in 2021, Lowry and his team finally found the cache of buried bottles. They brought one bottle — the 16th — to the lab and planted its seeds. “When the first [sprout] came up, I was the first one to see it,” Lowry says. “There it was. That was extremely exciting.”
Ultimately, 20 seeds sprouted. All of them were Verbascum, a flowering weed with hairy leaves that flourishes on the edge of ditches and meadows. Lowry and his colleagues confirmed the species using genetic tools that weren’t available last time a bottle was studied. The next bottle won’t be examined until 2040.
The experiment is easy to continue, Lowry says. “It’s not that much effort.” But it takes commitment — and willingness to be a team player across multiple generations.
Scientists want to make contributions to their fields and be known for their work. “But at a certain point you’re no longer there,” Lowry says. “The science continues without you. And it’s important to recognize that it’s a process that’s bigger than individual humans themselves.”
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