Soil Carbon Transport

We learn a lot of information from textbooks, but sometimes research outcomes reveal textbooks to be wrong. I have read a few textbooks say that when soil erodes in a landscape, most of the organic carbon in that soil is lost to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. However, several researchers have tested this idea of carbon loss and have shown it to be not true. Some organic matter can be lost to the atmosphere upon erosion, but the majority of it is simply relocated within landscapes, resulting in rich, fertile soils where eroded materials are deposited. 

 

We know that the best way to prevent organic carbon from entering into the atmosphere is to protect it from consumption by microbes. Protection can come in the form of burial, permanent freezing, or attaching with mineral surfaces. In this work we confirmed that the movement of soil by erosion results in more soil carbon associating with minerals.

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Beth A. Fisher, Anthony K. Aufdenkampe, Kyungsoo Yoo, Rolf E. Aalto, Julia Marquard. (2018) Soil carbon redistribution and organo-mineral associations after lateral soil movement and mixing in a first-order forest watershed. Geoderma, 319: 142-155. doi: 10.1016/j.geoderma.2018.01.006.