Biogeochemistry articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    Low phosphorus burial in shallow marine sedimentary rocks before about 750 million years ago implies a change in the global phosphorus cycle, coinciding with the end of what may have been a stable low-oxygen world.

    • Christopher T. Reinhard
    • , Noah J. Planavsky
    •  & Kurt O. Konhauser

  • Comment |

    The causes of Earth's transition are human and social, write Erle Ellis and colleagues, so scholars from those disciplines must be included in its formalization.

    • Erle Ellis
    • , Mark Maslin
    •  & Andrew Bauer

  • News & Views |

    Changes in the amount of carbon stored in soil might be a crucial feedback to climate change. Experimental field studies show that warming-induced soil carbon losses are greatest where carbon stocks are largest. See Letter p.104

    • Eric A. Davidson

  • Letter |

    A compilation of global soil carbon data from field experiments provides empirical evidence that warming-induced net losses of soil carbon could accelerate climate change.

    • T. W. Crowther
    • , K. E. O. Todd-Brown
    •  & M. A. Bradford

  • Letter |

    There is an abrupt transition from alkaline to acid soil pH when mean annual precipitation exceeds mean annual potential evapotranspiration, demonstrating that climate creates a nonlinear pattern in soil solution chemistry at the global scale.

    • E. W. Slessarev
    • , Y. Lin
    •  & O. A. Chadwick

  • Comment |

    To explain why our planet is habitable, geoscientists studying Earth’s surface and interior must work with each other and with communications scholars, write Ariel D. Anbar, Christy B. Till and Mark A. Hannah.

    • Ariel D. Anbar
    • , Christy B. Till
    •  & Mark A. Hannah

  • News & Views |

    A database of the carbon-isotope 'fingerprints' of methane has been used to constrain the contributions of different sources to the global methane budget. The surprising results have implications for climate prediction. See Letter p.88

    • Grant Allen

  • News & Views |

    Carbon emissions from the Arctic tundra could increase drastically as global warming thaws permafrost. Clues now obtained about the long-term effects of such thawing on carbon dioxide emissions highlight the need for more data.

    • Donatella Zona

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • J. Evaristo
    • , S. Jasechko
    •  & J. J. McDonnell

  • Article |

    Bacteria of the SAR11 clade constitute up to one half of all marine microbes and are thought to require oxygen for growth; here, a subgroup of SAR11 bacteria are shown to thrive in ocean oxygen minimum zones and to encode abundant respiratory nitrate reductases.

    • Despina Tsementzi
    • , Jieying Wu
    •  & Frank J. Stewart

  • News & Views |

    A field study of methane emissions from wetlands reveals that more of the gas escapes through diffusive processes than was thought, mostly at night. Because methane is a greenhouse gas, the findings have implications for global warming.

    • Katey Walter Anthony
    •  & Sally MacIntyre

  • Letter |

    Climate models require an understanding of ecosystem-scale respiration and photosynthesis, yet there is no way of measuring these two fluxes directly; here, new instrumentation is used to determine these fluxes in a temperate forest, showing, for instance, that respiration is less during the day than at night.

    • R. Wehr
    • , J. W. Munger
    •  & S. R. Saleska

  • News & Views |

    An analysis suggests that high carbon uptake by US land ecosystems during the warm spring of 2012 offset the carbon loss that resulted from severe drought over the summer — and hints that the warm spring could have worsened the drought.

    • Yude Pan
    •  & David Schimel

  • Obituary |

    Geochemist who deciphered chemical signatures in the modern and ancient oceans.

    • Rosalind E. M. Rickaby

  • Perspective |

    The potential of soils to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions has not been exploited; here we discuss and recommend research and technology developments to implement mitigation practices.

    • Keith Paustian
    • , Johannes Lehmann
    •  & Pete Smith

  • Letter |

    The net balance of terrestrial biogenic greenhouse gases produced as a result of human activities and the climatic impact of this balance are uncertain; here the net cumulative impact of the three greenhouse gases, methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide, on the planetary energy budget from 2001 to 2010 is a warming of the planet.

    • Hanqin Tian
    • , Chaoqun Lu
    •  & Steven C. Wofsy

  • News & Views |

    Simulations of the flux of atmospheric carbon dioxide into the ocean show that changes in flux associated with human activities are currently masked by natural climate variations, but will be evident in the near future. See Letter p.469

    • Tatiana Ilyina

  • Column |

    Diverse faces are appearing on a frozen continent, says Robin Bell.

    • Robin Bell

  • Letter |

    A climate modelling experiment is used to identify where ocean carbon uptake should change as a result of anthropogenic climate change and to distinguish these changes from internal climate variability; we may be able to detect changing uptake in some oceanic regions between 2020 and 2050, but until then, internal climate variability will preclude such detection.

    • Galen A. McKinley
    • , Darren J. Pilcher
    •  & Nicole S. Lovenduski

  • Feature |

    Unsettled markets lead to shifting employment prospects for petroleum geoscientists.

    • Virginia Gewin

  • Letter |

    A reconstruction of changes in ocean oxygenation throughout the last glacial cycle shows that respired carbon was removed from the deep Southern Ocean during deglaciation and Antarctic warm events, consistent with a prominent role of reduced iron fertilization and enhanced ocean ventilation, modifying atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 80,000 years.

    • Samuel L. Jaccard
    • , Eric D. Galbraith
    •  & Robert F. Anderson

  • Letter |

    Core isotope measurements in the equatorial Pacific Ocean reveal that although atmospheric dust deposition during the last ice age was higher than today’s, the productivity of the equatorial Pacific Ocean did not increase; this may have been because iron-enabled greater nutrient consumption, mainly in the Southern Ocean, reduced the nutrients available in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, and hence also productivity there.

    • K. M. Costa
    • , J. F. McManus
    •  & A. C. Ravelo

  • News & Views |

    Magnesium is not usually considered to be a constituent of Earth's core, but its presence there has now been proposed to explain an ongoing enigma — the identity of the energy sources that drive our planet's magnetic field. See Letter p.387

    • Bruce Buffett

  • News |

    Temperature rise outpaces warming of atmosphere, and threatens aquatic ecosystems.

    • Alexandra Witze

  • Article |

    Until now, the oxidation steps necessary for complete nitrification have always been observed to occur in two separate microorganisms in a cross-feeding interaction; here, together with the study by van Kessel et al., Daims et al. report the enrichment and characterization of Nitrospira species that encode all of the enzymes necessary to catalyse complete nitrification, a phenotype referred to as “comammox” (for complete ammonia oxidation).

    • Holger Daims
    • , Elena V. Lebedeva
    •  & Michael Wagner

  • Perspective |

    Careful management of nitrogen fertilizer usage is required to ensure world food security while limiting environmental degradation; an analysis of historical nitrogen use efficiency reveals socio-economic factors and technological innovations that have influenced a range of past national trends and that suggest ways to improve global food production and environmental stewardship by 2050.

    • Xin Zhang
    • , Eric A. Davidson
    •  & Ye Shen

  • Perspective |

    Instead of containing stable and chemically unique ‘humic substances’, as has been widely accepted, soil organic matter is a mixture of progressively decomposing organic compounds; this has broad implications for soil science and its applications.

    • Johannes Lehmann
    •  & Markus Kleber

  • News & Views |

    Ships and ocean-observing robots have been used to quantify the amount of nutrients that a storm brings up from the Stygian ocean depths to the sunlit surface — a first step in assessing how storms affect oceanic biomass production.

    • Jaime Palter

  • News & Views |

    How will Earth's vegetation cover respond to climate change, and how does this compare with changes associated with human land use? Modelling studies reveal how little we still know, and act as a clarion call for further work.

    • Almut Arneth

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