Detrital Carbonate Minerals in Earth's Element Cycles (Data & Scripts)

Earth surface conditions, including climate and sea level, are largely controlled by the cycling of carbon and biogeochemically coupled elements. However, most elemental budgets cannot be consentaneously balanced for the present state. Here, we investigate the possible role of riverine carbonate minerals in biogeochemical cycles. We derive 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 datasets. Results point to a significance of riverine detrital carbonates for the global mass balances of carbon, calcium, alkalinity and strontium, which might help solving this long-standing problem.      

[Plain Language summary from: Müller et al. 2022, Detrital Carbonates in Earth's Element Cycles, GBC, https://doi.org/10.1002/essoar.10508409.1 ].

Here data and scripts on which these investigations are based can be accessed.

Funding:
This work was carried out under the umbrella of the Netherlands Earth System Science Centre (NESSC). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie, grant agreement No 847504. Funding was also provided by BMBF-project PALMOD (Ref 01LP1506C) through the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as Research for Sustainability inititative (FONA). AS thanks the European Research Council for Consolidator Grant 771497.