Journal
NATURE GEOSCIENCE
Volume 8, Issue 5, Pages 383-387Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/NGEO2422
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- NSF [0839078]
- National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant - Korean Government (MSIP) [2014R1A1A2A16054779]
- Swiss National Science Foundation [136295]
- European Commission [264879, 243908]
- NSF (University of New Hampshire) [0230396, 0440817, 0944348, 0944266]
- NSF
- National Research Foundation of Korea [2014R1A1A2A16054779] Funding Source: Korea Institute of Science & Technology Information (KISTI), National Science & Technology Information Service (NTIS)
- Directorate For Geosciences
- Office of Polar Programs (OPP) [0944348, GRANTS:13995940] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The stability of terrestrial carbon reservoirs is thought to be closely linked to variations in climate(1), but the magnitude of carbon-climate feedbacks has proved difficult to constrain for both modern(2-4) and millennial(5-13) timescales. Reconstructions of atmospheric CO2 concentrations for the past thousand years have shown fluctuations on multidecadal to centennial timescales(5-7), but the causes of these fluctuations are unclear. Here we report high-resolution carbon isotope measurements of CO2 trapped within the ice of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide ice core for the past 1,000 years. We use a deconvolution approach(14) to show that changes in terrestrial organic carbon stores best explain the observed multidecadal variations in the delta C-13 of CO2 and in CO2 concentrations from 755 to 1850 CE. If significant long-term carbon emissions came from pre-industrial anthropogenic land-use changes over this interval, the emissions must have been offset by a natural terrestrial sink for C-13-depleted carbon, such as peatlands. We find that on multidecadal timescales, carbon cycle changes seem to vary with reconstructed regional climate changes. We conclude that climate variability could be an important control of fluctuations in land carbon storage on these timescales.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available