Agricultural soil erosion is thought to perturb the global carbon cycle, but estimates of its effect range from a source of 1 petagram per year(-1) to a sink of the same magnitude. By using caesium-137 and carbon inventory measurements from a large-scale survey, we found consistent evidence for an erosion-induced sink of atmospheric carbon equivalent to approximately 26% of the carbon transport...

Measurements of carbon-14 in small samples of methane from major biogenic sources, from biomass burning, and in "clean air" samples from both the Northern and Southern hemispheres reveal that methane from ruminants contains contemporary carbon, whereas that from wetlands, pat bogs, rice fields, and tundra is somewhat, depleted in carbon-14. Atmospheric (14)GH(4) seems to have increased from 198...

The North Atlantic is believed to represent the largest ocean sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide in the Northern Hemisphere, yet little is known about its temporal variability. We report an 18-year time series of upper-ocean inorganic carbon observations from the northwestern subtropical North Atlantic near Bermuda that indicates substantial variability in this sink. We deduce that the carbon ...

Citation: Schulz KG, Bach LT, Bellerby RGJ, Bermúdez R, Büdenbender J, Boxhammer T, Czerny J, Engel A, Ludwig A, Meyerhöfer M, Larsen A, Paul AJ, Sswat M and Riebesell U (2017) Phytoplankton Blooms at Increasing Levels of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide: Experimental Evidence for Negative Effects on Prymnesiophytes and Positive on Small Picoeukaryotes. Front. Mar. Sci. 4:64. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2017....

Models describing the evolution of the partial pressure of atmospheric oxygen over Phanerozoic time are constrained by the mass balances required between the inputs and outputs of carbon and sulfur to the oceans. This constraint has limited the applicability of proposed negative feedback mechanisms for maintaining levels of atmospheric O(2) at biologically permissable levels. Here we describe a...

[1] Iron fertilization of macronutrient-rich but biologically unproductive ocean waters has been proposed for sequestering anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2). The first carbon export measurements in the Southern Ocean (SO) during the recent SO-Iron Experiment (SOFeX) yielded 900 t C exported per 1.26 t Fe added. This allows the first realistic, data-based feasibility assessment of large-scale i...

The discovery that methane from dissociation of gas-hydrates could be an important factor in the global carbon cycle resolves the major discrepancy in estimates of the increase of terrestrial biomass from the Last Glacial period to the present. Carbon isotope budgeting using the marine carbon isotopic record results in an estimate centered around 500 GtC; whereas palaeovegetation reconstruction...

The Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), a rapid global warming event and carbon-cycle perturbation of the early Palaeogene, provides a unique test of climate and carbon-cycle models as well as our understanding of sedimentary methane hydrate stability, albeit under conditions very different from the modern. The principal expression of the PETM in the geological record is a large and rapid...

Legumes have developed a unique way to interact with bacteria: in addition to preventing infection from pathogenic bacteria like any other plant, legumes also developed a mutualistic symbiotic relationship with one gender of soil bacteria: rhizobium. This interaction leads to the development of a new root organ, the nodule, where the differentiated bacteria fix for the plant the atmospheric din...

[1] Brown carbon is a ubiquitous and unidentified component of organic aerosol which has recently come into the forefront of atmospheric research. This component is strongly linked to the class of humic-like substances (HULIS) in aerosol whose ultimate origin is still being debated. Using a simplified spectroscopic method the concentrations of brown carbon have been determined in aqueous extrac...