2026/01/01 by Shanshan Yang, Juan Li, Yakov Kuzyakov +10 · 1 voice
Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Climate change and permafrost #Geology and Paleoclimatology Research #Tree-ring climate responses
paper · pdf · doi:10.59717/j.xinn-geo.2026.100214
openalex publication_date 2026/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/03/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
<p>Mitigation of climate change and maintenance of ecosystem functions highlight the great importance of carbon sequestration in soil, which is a long-term process ongoing over decades, centuries, and even millennia. Here we compiled 2,222 radiocarbon (<sup>14</sup>C) measurements of soil organic matter from 408 soil profiles spanning all major biomes and coupled radiocarbon-based chronology with a chronosequence framework to reconstruct soil carbon accumulation since the early Holocene. This millennial-scale reconstruction captures long-term, non-linear trajectories and biome-dependent patterns over the Holocene. Our findings indicate that temperature was the dominant factor shaping the global spatial and temporal patterns of the carbon accumulation rate (CAR). Notably, the spatial sensitivity of CAR to temperature was nearly twofold greater than the within-profile temporal sensitivity, indicating that spatial gradients alone do not fully represent the magnitude of long-term temperature responses. Globally, CAR declines from the early Holocene to the present (Anthropocene) and is projected to decrease further by 11% under the SSP126 scenario and by 18% under the SSP585 scenario. High-latitude permafrost and wetland soils show the highest historical CAR but also the largest projected declines, whereas tropical soils exhibit a positive CAR–temperature relationship, which may reflect warming-associated increases in plant and root carbon inputs over long timescales. This radiocarbon-constrained CAR reconstruction provides an observation-based benchmark for evaluating Earth system models and highlights the increasing vulnerability of high-latitude soil carbon reservoirs under ongoing warming.</p>