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Soil science

The Arctic carbon count

Nature Geoscience volume 1, pages 569–570 (2008)Cite this article

Despite its potential importance in a warming world, the organic carbon content of Arctic soils has escaped robust quantification. A closer look at the North American sector suggests that much more carbon is stored in these high northern grounds than previously thought.

Human-induced greenhouse-gas emissions will cause further warming of our planet, with the greatest temperature increases expected in the Arctic region1, where warming is expected to thaw the permanently frozen ground (permafrost). The fate of the organic carbon that is currently stored within these soils is highly uncertain. Will it decompose releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and, if so, could this accelerate global warming? To answer these questions we first need to determine how much organic carbon is stored in Arctic soils. On page 615 of this issue, Ping and colleagues2 take us one step closer, revealing a high, and extremely variable, organic carbon content in soils across several landscape types of the North American Arctic region.

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Figure 1: Interactions between the carbon cycle and the climate system in the Arctic.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Christian Beer is at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Hans-Knöll-Str. 10, Jena, DE-07745, Germany. christian.beer@bgc-jena.mpg.de,

    Christian Beer

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  1. Christian Beer
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Beer, C. The Arctic carbon count. Nature Geosci 1, 569–570 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo292

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