Detrital Carbonate Minerals in Earth's Element Cycles

What is it about?

Detrital carbonate minerals, or limestone fragments, are transported by river to the ocean where they might play an important role for biogeochemical cycles on a global and regional scale. Here we quantify individual river basin export fluxes, the global export flux to the ocean, and its reduction by human influence, utilizing state-of-the-art regression techniques and published global-scale data sets. Results point to a significance of riverine detrital carbonates for the global mass balances of carbon, calcium, alkalinity, and strontium, which might help in solving long-standing problems in elemental budgeting and improve our understanding of the carbon cycle.

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Photo by kazuend on Unsplash

Photo by kazuend on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Detrital carbonates are a commonly neglected or ignored constituent several biogeochemical cycles and as a result, comprehensible state-of-the-art quantification, as well as an assessment of its potential role in these biogeochemical cycles were missing. Here we fill this gap and provide a conceptual framework for the integration of this flux into inorganic carbon and calcium cycling.

Perspectives