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A Billion Tons of Unaccounted for Carbon in the Southeastern United States
Author(s) -
Gonzalez Yaslin N.,
Bacon Allan R.,
Harris Willie G.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2018gl077540
Subject(s) - soil carbon , carbon fibers , carbon cycle , earth science , environmental science , vegetation (pathology) , earth system science , atmosphere (unit) , natural (archaeology) , total organic carbon , physical geography , carbon accounting , geology , soil science , hydrology (agriculture) , soil water , climate change , oceanography , geography , paleontology , ecology , environmental chemistry , ecosystem , meteorology , chemistry , materials science , pathology , composite number , composite material , biology , medicine , geotechnical engineering
Because Earth's soil contains more carbon than the atmosphere and all terrestrial vegetation combined, forecasting and managing the global carbon cycle in the face of natural and anthropogenic change requires accurate representations of this carbon. Here from regional geomorphic and soil databases, we characterize the mass, distribution, and cycling of previously unaccounted for soil carbon across the southeastern U.S. Coastal Plain, referred to as “deep‐podzolized carbon.” We show that geomorphologic‐hydrologic interactions stabilize approximately 1.1 × 10 −9 t of deep‐podzolized carbon (equivalent to roughly 18% of the soil organic carbon stored across the entire region from 0–30 cm), and that this potentially ancient carbon is predictably distributed coincident with Pleistocene marine transgressions. We not only redefine soil carbon storage in the region but we also introduce the Earth Sciences to a massive organic carbon pool that interacts with landscape evolution and hydrology, has essentially never been studied, and is ripe for interdisciplinary research.