Hydrologic control of carbon cycling and aged carbon discharge in the Congo River basin
Date
2016-07Author
Schefuß, Enno
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Eglinton, Timothy I.
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Spencer-Jones, Charlotte L.
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Rullkötter, Jürgen
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De Pol-Holz, Ricardo
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Talbot, Helen M.
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Grootes, Pieter M.
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Schneider, Ralph R.
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https://hdl.handle.net/1912/8465As published
https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2778Abstract
The age of organic material discharged by rivers provides information about its
sources and carbon cycling processes within watersheds. While elevated ages in
fluvially-transported organic matter are usually explained by erosion of soils and sediments deposits it is commonly assumed that mainly young organic material is
discharged from flat tropical watersheds due to their extensive plant cover and rapid
carbon turnover. Here we present compound-specific radiocarbon data of terrigenous
organic fractions from a sedimentary archive offshore the Congo River in conjunction
with molecular markers for methane-producing land cover reflecting wetland extent.
We find that the Congo River has been discharging aged organic matter for several
thousand years with apparently increasing ages from the Mid- to the Late Holocene.
This suggests that aged organic matter in modern samples is concealed by radiocarbon
from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. By comparison to indicators for past rainfall
changes we detect a systematic control of organic matter sequestration and release by
continental hydrology mediating temporary carbon storage in wetlands. As aridification
also leads to exposure and rapid remineralization of large amounts of previously stored
labile organic matter we infer that this process may cause a profound direct climate
feedback currently underestimated in carbon cycle assessments.
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Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Nature Publishing Group for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Nature Geoscience 9 (2016): 687-690, doi:10.1038/ngeo2778.
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Suggested Citation
Preprint: Schefuß, Enno, Eglinton, Timothy I., Spencer-Jones, Charlotte L., Rullkötter, Jürgen, De Pol-Holz, Ricardo, Talbot, Helen M., Grootes, Pieter M., Schneider, Ralph R., "Hydrologic control of carbon cycling and aged carbon discharge in the Congo River basin", 2016-07, https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2778, https://hdl.handle.net/1912/8465Related items
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