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Anthropogenic impacts on mud and organic carbon cycling

Nature Geoscience volume 17, pages 287–297 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Fine-grained muds produced largely from rock weathering at the Earth’s surface have great influence on global carbon cycling. Mud binds and protects organic carbon (OC) from remineralization, and its organic loading controls the amounts, timescales and pathways of OC sequestration in sediments and soils. Human activities have resulted in marked changes (both increases and decreases) in mud accumulation and associated OC (mud–OC) loadings in different environments via altering organic matter inputs and reactivity. Such impacts on mud and mud–OC can be directly caused by activities such as damming and levee building, or indirectly result from human-induced climate change. Here we present a synthesis of impacts of human activities on the production, transfer and storage of mud–OC. In general, we find that anthropogenic climate warming has increased net fluxes of mud–OC in most of the systems discussed here (for example, mountain glaciers, land erosion, dam burial, river export, permafrost thaw, ice-sheet erosion and burial in margins), with uncertainties for tidal flats and floodplains, and probably net losses for coastal wetlands. Whether the anthropogenic mobilization of mud–OC results in more or less sequestration of OC is not known with the current data, as it is dependent on timescales that involve complex transient effects.

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Fig. 1: Major pathways of mud movement, POC fluxes and human-induced changes.
Fig. 2: Examples of major perturbations of mud–OC pathways.
Fig. 3: Gradients of mud–OC reactivity.

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Acknowledgements

The Jon and Beverly Thompson Chair in Geological Sciences at the University of Florida provided support for T.S.B. D.B.K. was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (grant no. 2023YFF0804000). P.R. received financial support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme ESM2025 – Earth System Models for the Future project (grant no. 101003536) and the Belgian Science Policy Office (grant no. FED-tWIN2019prf-008). S.A. received funding from the Belgian Science Policy Office (grant no. FED-tWIN2019prf-008). V.G. received funds from NSF-OCE-1851309.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geological Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Thomas S. Bianchi & Joao H. F. Amaral

  2. School of Marine Sciences, University of Maine, Walpole, ME, USA

    Lawrence M. Mayer

  3. Earth System Science Program, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Universidad del Rosario, Bogota, Colombia

    Joao H. F. Amaral

  4. BGeoSys, Department of Geosciences, Environment and Society, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Sandra Arndt & Pierre Regnier

  5. iC3, Center for Ice, Climate, Carbon and Cryosphere, UiT the Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

    Sandra Arndt

  6. Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA

    Valier Galy

  7. State Key Laboratory of Biogeology and Environmental Geology and Hubei Key Laboratory of Critical Zone Evolution, School of Earth Sciences, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, China

    David B. Kemp

  8. Virginia Institute of Marine Science, William & Mary, Gloucester Point, VA, USA

    Steven A. Kuehl

  9. College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

    Nicholas J. Murray

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T.S.B., L.M.M., J.H.F.A., S.A., V.G., D.B.K., S.A.K., N.J.M. and P.R. contributed to the conceptual development and writing of this paper. T.S.B., L.M.M and J.H.F.A. were key in leading the group through different stages of progress and revision. T.S.B., J.H.F.A, L.M.M., S.A., N.J.M. and P.R. contributed greatly to development and revisions of the table and figures.

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Correspondence to Thomas S. Bianchi.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Marisa Repasch, Joel Scheingross and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Xujia Jiang, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Supplementary Fig. 1 and references.

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Bianchi, T.S., Mayer, L.M., Amaral, J.H.F. et al. Anthropogenic impacts on mud and organic carbon cycling. Nat. Geosci. 17, 287–297 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01405-5

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