Mineral protection regulates long-term global preservation of natural organic carbon

The balance between photosynthetic organic carbon production and respiration controls atmospheric composition and climate(1,2). The majority of organic carbon is respired back to carbon dioxide in the biosphere, but a small fraction escapes remineralization and is preserved over geological timescales(3). By removing reduced carbon from Earth's surface, this sequestration process promotes atmospheric oxygen accumulation(2) and carbon dioxide removal1. Two major mechanisms have been proposed to explain organic carbon preservation: selective preservation of biochemically unreactive compounds(4,5) and protection resulting from interactions with a mineral matrix(6,7). Although both mechanisms can operate across a range of environments and timescales, their global relative importance on 1,000-year to 100,000-year timescales remains uncertain(4). Here we present a global dataset of the distributions of organic carbon activation energy and corresponding radiocarbon ages in soils, sediments and dissolved organic carbon. We find that activation energy distributions broaden over time in all mineral-containing samples. This result requires increasing bond-strength diversity, consistent with the formation of organo-mineral bonds(8) but inconsistent with selective preservation. Radiocarbon ages further reveal that high-energy, mineral-bound organic carbon persists for millennia relative to low-energy, unbound organic carbon. Our results provide globally coherent evidence for the proposed(7) importance of mineral protection in promoting organic carbon preservation. We suggest that similar studies of bond-strength diversity in ancient sediments may reveal how and why organic carbon preservation-and thus atmospheric composition and climate-has varied over geological time.