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Geochemistry

A piece of the deep carbon puzzle

Nature Geoscience volume 7, pages 333–334 (2014)Cite this article

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Carbon loss from subducting slabs is thought to be insufficient to balance carbon dioxide emissions at arc volcanoes. Analyses of ancient subducted rocks in Greece suggest that fluid dissolution of slab carbonate can help solve this carbon-cycle conundrum.

The carbon cycle in Earth's near-surface reservoirs — the atmosphere, oceans, biosphere and sedimentary rocks — has received widespread attention1,2. Yet there is another carbon cycle that operates on the planetary scale: carbon is buried in the mantle where one tectonic plate slides under another, and it returns to the surface from the deep Earth, mainly through volcanism3. The mass of carbon involved in the familiar, shallow cycle merely reflects the balance between the two principal transfers of this deep carbon cycle. In essence, the carbon that is so essential to life and modern society is available to us only with the permission of the deep Earth4. The deep carbon budget is poorly constrained, however, largely because the mechanisms for transferring carbon from subducting slabs to arc volcanoes are unclear. Ague and Nicolescu5 now suggest in Nature Geoscience that significant amounts of carbonate minerals are dissolved from subducting slabs by infiltrating fluids, aiding the transfer of carbon back to Earth's surface.

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Figure 1: The deep carbon cycle.

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  1. Craig E. Manning is in the Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095-1567, USA,

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Correspondence to Craig E. Manning.

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Manning, C. A piece of the deep carbon puzzle. Nature Geosci 7, 333–334 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2152

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