Babakhani, P., Dale, A.W., Woulds, C. orcid.org/0000-0002-3681-1468 et al. (4 more authors) (2025) Preservation of organic carbon in marine sediments sustained by sorption and transformation processes. Nature Geoscience, 18 (1). pp. 78-83. ISSN 1752-0894
Abstract
Controls on organic carbon preservation in marine sediments remain controversial but crucial for understanding past and future climate dynamics. Here we develop a conceptual-mathematical model to determine the key processes for the preservation of organic carbon. The model considers the major processes involved in the breakdown of organic carbon, including dissolved organic carbon hydrolysis, mixing, remineralization, mineral sorption and molecular transformation. This allows redefining of burial efficiency as preservation efficiency, which considers both particulate organic carbon and mineral-phase organic carbon. We show that preservation efficiency is almost three times higher than the conventionally defined burial efficiency and reconciles predictions with global field data. Kinetic sorption and transformation are the dominant controls on organic carbon preservation. We conclude that a synergistic effect between kinetic sorption and molecular transformation (geopolymerization) creates a mineral shuttle in which mineral-phase organic carbon is protected from remineralization in the surface sediment and released at depth. The results explain why transformed organic carbon persists over long timescales and increases with depth.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) > River Basin Processes & Management (Leeds) The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Earth Surface Science Institute (ESSI) (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EU - European Union 725613 Royal Society WRM\FT\170005 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 30 Jan 2025 14:48 |
Last Modified: | 30 Jan 2025 14:48 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Nature |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41561-024-01606-y |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:222615 |