Marked isotopic variability within and between the Amazon River and marine dissolved black carbon pools

Riverine dissolved organic carbon (DOC) contains charcoal byproducts, termed black carbon (BC). To determine the significance of BC as a sink of atmospheric CO2 and reconcile budgets, the sources and fate of this large, slow-cycling and elusive carbon pool must be constrained. The Amazon River is a significant part of global BC cycling because it exports an order of magnitude more DOC, and thus dissolved BC (DBC), than any other river. We report spatially resolved DBC quantity and radiocarbon (Δ14C) measurements, paired with molecular-level characterization of dissolved organic matter from the Amazon River and tributaries during low discharge. The proportion of BC-like polycyclic aromatic structures decreases downstream, but marked spatial variability in abundance and Δ14C values of DBC molecular markers imply dynamic sources and cycling in a manner that is incongruent with bulk DOC. We estimate a flux from the Amazon River of 1.9–2.7 Tg DBC yr−1 that is composed of predominately young DBC, suggesting that loss processes of modern DBC are important. Black carbon produced by the burning of biomass and fuels is the most stable carbon compound in nature, yet its path from land to the deep ocean where it persists for thousands of years remains mysterious. Here Coppola and colleagues characterize the black carbon exported by the Amazon River, the largest river in the world.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Nature Communications

• Publication date

  2019-09-05

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/s41467-019-11543-9PMID 31488815PMCID 6728373
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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