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Carbon cycle responses to changes in weathering and the long-term fate of stable carbon isotopes
  • Aurich Jeltsch-Thömmes,
  • Fortunat Joos
Aurich Jeltsch-Thömmes
University of Bern

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Fortunat Joos
University of Bern
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Abstract

The causes of the variations in CO2 of the past million years remain poorly understood. Imbalances between the input of elements from rock weathering and their removal from the atmosphere-ocean-biosphere system to the lithosphere likely contributed to reconstructed changes. We employ the Bern3D Earth system model of intermediate complexity to investigate carbon-climate responses to step-changes in the weathering input of phosphorus, alkalinity, carbon, and carbon isotope ratio (δ13C) in simulations extending up to 600,000 years.
CO2 and climate approach a new equilibrium within a few ten thousand years, whereas the equilibration lasts several hundred thousand years for δ13C. These timescales represent a challenge for the initialization of sediment-enabled models and unintended drifts may be larger than forced signals in simulations of the last glacial-interglacial cycle. Changes in dissolved CO2 change isotopic fractionation during marine photosynthesis and δ13C of organic matter. This mechanism and changes in the organic matter export cause distinct spatio-temporal perturbations in δ13C of dissolved inorganic carbon.
A cost-efficient emulator is built with the Bern3D responses and applied in contrasting literature-based weathering histories for the past 800,000 years. Differences between scenarios for carbonate rock weathering reach around a third of the glacial-interglacial CO2 amplitude, 0.05 ‰ for δ13C, and exceed reconstructed variations in marine carbonate ion. Plausible input from the decomposition of organic matter on shelves causes variations of up to 10 ppm in CO2 , 4 mmol m−3 in CO2−3, and 0.09‰ in δ13C. Our results demonstrate that weathering-burial imbalances are important for past climate variations.