alt Hacker NewsI googled peat so you dont have to
Peat is a soft, spongy material made from dead plants that did not fully rot. It forms very slowly in wet, swampy places called bogs
It is used as fuel as well as fertilizer
Replies
Anybody whose done any amount of gardening or has houseplants is probably familiar with peat. Though its harvest is destructive to the unique peat bog environments it forms
It is also used to give whisky a smokey taste.
It usually holds many times its solid weight in water. If you add load to it by building something on it (without designing around the ground conditions) it can compress to a fraction of its volume, resulting in ground settlements that can be very large.
Next, google "bog butter" to see one of their more interesting uses.
pre-industrial peoples in some parts of the world used this material extensively.. some still do
Can also be used to build a home. Up to 1940 that is how the lowest class in The Netherlands lived. Plaggenhutten, homes made out of peat, straw, manure.
It is also a fantastic carbon sink.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/21/headway/peat-...
"Although peatlands make up just 3 percent of land on Earth, they store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined."
Nice it was historically just dug up and the leftovers turned into expensive holiday homes.