Mathematics of peatlands

Peatlands cover a few percent of the land surface but store a large share of the carbon held in soils. A peat bog is also a strange material: soft, wet, partly alive, and slowly flowing under its own weight over thousands of years. Most models treat it as a pile of carbon that grows and decays. Our work asks what changes when you take its mechanics seriously.

Questions we work on

• Can a bog keep growing for ever? Mechanical limits on how thick and how fast peat can accumulate.
• Does a peat core tell the truth? If a bog creeps, the record in a core can be rewritten, and some histories become impossible to tell apart.
• Why do bogs form patterns? Pools, ridges, stripes and mazes, and whether the mechanics of the peat sets their spacing.
• Peat as a material: water, gas and a soft organic skeleton, from the pore scale to the landscape.

Selected work

• A. W. Mahdiyasa, D. J. Large, M. Icardi, S. Grebby, B. P. Muljadi. Mechanical thresholds constrain global peatland carbon accumulation. Scientific Reports (2026).
• A. W. Mahdiyasa, D. J. Large, M. Icardi, B. P. Muljadi. MPeat2D: a fully coupled mechanical–ecohydrological model of peatland development in two dimensions. Earth Surface Dynamics 12 (2024).
• Code: MPeat, a long-term peatland development model with mechanics, ecology and hydrology.

MATHPEAT network

I coordinate, with David Large, the MATHPEAT network, supported by the Isaac Newton Institute and EPSRC, bringing together mathematicians, peatland scientists and engineers.

PhD projects

Two open PhD projects are on peat: Does a peat bog remember its own age? and Why do peat bogs make stripes and mazes? See PhD opportunities.