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A major feature of the Anthropocene is the drastic increase in global soil erosion. Soil erosion is threatening Earth habitability not only as soils are an essential component of the Earth system but also because societies depend on soils. However, proper quantification of the impact of human activities on erosion over thousands of years is still lacking. This is particularly crucial in mountainous areas, where the highest erosion rates are recorded. Here we use the Lake Bourget catchment, one of the largest in the European Alps, to estimate quantitatively the impact of human activities on erosion. Based on a multi-proxy, source-to-sink approach relying on isotopic geochemistry, we discriminate the effects of climate fluctuations from those of human activities on erosion over the last 10,000 years. We demonstrate that until 3800 years ago, climate is the only driver of erosion. From that time on, climate alone cannot explain the measured rates of erosion. Thanks to an unprecedented regional paleoenvironmental reconstruction, we highlight that the development of pastoralism at high altitudes from the Bronze Age onwards and the extension of agriculture starting in the Middle Ages were key factors in the drastic increase in erosion observed in the Alps. Using a lake sediment core taken from the European Alps and combining a source-sink approach with isotope geochemistry, it has been established that the effects of human activities have outweighed those of climate on erosion for more than 3800 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many forest soils are acidic and have very low plant-available pools of magnesium. Past and present sylvicultural, nutritional and/or climatic pressures endured by forest ecosystems can result in net losses of nutrients and ecosystem function losses. Liming with a carbonate product is an alternative to counteract these degradations but the effects of liming on the biogeochemical cycling of nutrients over time and the dynamics of Mg released from liming products are still unclear. We studied the Mg isotopes composition in four paired-treatment experimental beech forest ecosystems in northern France. At the sites where dolomitic lime was applied, the variation in exchangeable and foliar δ26Mg demonstrated the direct contribution of dolomite-derived Mg to the replenishment of topsoil exchangeable pools and to tree nutrition improvement: dolomite-derived Mg was incorporated into the biological cycling which allows its retention on the mid to long term in the soil–plant system. At the sites limed with calcium carbonate, the changes in exchangeable and foliar Mg contents and δ26Mg observed on the long term suggest that the applied product contained a small amount of Mg and/or that Mg cycling changed after liming, to cope in particular with the low Mg availability. Lastly, our results highlight the high δ26Mg of the organic layer (humus): fractionation processes occurring within this layer (mineralization/ageing of organic matter, preferential retention of 26 Mg) could explain these singular signatures that could greatly influence the topsoil Mg exchangeable pools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential use of Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca ratios in fish otolith, as a complement to 87Sr/86Sr to study movements of Prochilodus lineatus, was evaluated in the La Plata Basin (South America). Water ratios were obtained from samples collected during the high and low water seasons at 42 sites across the La Plata Basin. Elemental and isotopic ratios in water were measured by MC-ICP-MS, ICP-MS and ion chromatography, and obtained from available literature. Fish were caught from six different sites with different physiochemical features. Otolith core-to-edge Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca profiles were determined by LA-ICP-MS, while the otolith 87Sr/86Sr data set was taken from literature. The predictive classification by rivers according to water Sr/Ca, Ba/Ca and 87Sr/86Sr ratios (92.5%) was higher than that based solely on 87Sr/86Sr (58%), with classification that reached 100% for several rivers. Unlike Ba/Ca, a significant relationship (R2 = 0.94, p < 0.05) was found between otolith edge and water Sr/Ca, suggesting that this could be an efficient movement indicator for P. lineatus. The Sr/Ca ratio complemented the information provided by Sr isotopes and it was particularly useful in the northwest basin, where the isotopes alone do not allow differentiating between large rivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graph: Supplementary file1 (XLSX 18 KB) Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-023-01419-9. [Extracted from the article]

The Cambrian explosion, the rapid appearance of most animal phyla in the geological record, occurred concurrently with bottom seawater oxygenation. Whether this oxygenation event was triggered through enhanced nutrient supply and organic carbon burial forced by increased continental weathering, or by species engaging in ecosystem engineering, remains a fundamental yet unresolved question. Here we provide evidence for several simultaneous developments that took place over the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition: expansion of siliceous sponges, decrease of the dissolved organic carbon pool, enhanced organic carbon burial, increased phosphorus removal and seawater oxygenation. This evidence is based on silicon and carbon stable isotopes, Ge/Si ratios, REE-geochemistry and redox-sensitive elements in a chert-shale succession from the Yangtze Platform, China. According to this reconstruction, sponges have initiated seawater oxygenation by redistributing organic carbon oxidation through filtering suspended organic matter from seawater. The resulting increase in dissolved oxygen levels potentially triggered the diversification of eumetazoans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soils of the northern high latitudes store carbon over millennial timescales (thousands of years) and contain approximately double the carbon stock of the atmosphere. Warming and associated permafrost thaw can expose soil organic carbon and result in mineralization and carbon dioxide (CO2) release. However, some of this soil organic carbon may be eroded and transferred to rivers. If it escapes degradation during river transport and is buried in marine sediments, then it can contribute to a longer-term (more than ten thousand years), geological CO2 sink. Despite this recognition, the erosional flux and fate of particulate organic carbon (POC) in large rivers at high latitudes remains poorly constrained. Here, we quantify the source of POC in the Mackenzie River, the main sediment supplier to the Arctic Ocean, and assess its flux and fate. We combine measurements of radiocarbon, stable carbon isotopes and element ratios to correct for rock-derived POC. Our samples reveal that the eroded biospheric POC has resided in the basin for millennia, with a mean radiocarbon age of 5,800 ± 800 years, much older than the POC in large tropical rivers. From the measured biospheric POC content and variability in annual sediment yield, we calculate a biospheric POC flux of teragrams of carbon per year from the Mackenzie River, which is three times the CO2 drawdown by silicate weathering in this basin. Offshore, we find evidence for efficient terrestrial organic carbon burial over the Holocene period, suggesting that erosion of organic carbon-rich, high-latitude soils may result in an important geological CO2 sink. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the Quaternary period, the Earth's surface has been subject to large changes in temperature and precipitation associated with fluctuations between glacial and interglacial states that have affected biogeochemical cycling. However, the effect of these climate oscillations on weathering is debated, with climate modelling efforts using empirical relationships between measures of climate and weathering suggesting minimal changes in global weathering rates between these two climate states. The ratio of the cosmogenic isotope 10Be, which is produced in the atmosphere and deposited to the oceans and the land surface, to 9Be, which is introduced to the oceans by the riverine silicate weathering flux, can be used to track relative weathering fluxes. Here we apply this proxy to marine sediment beryllium records spanning the past two million years, and find no detectable shifts in inputs from global silicate weathering into the oceans. Using climate model simulations of the Last Glacial Maximum along with a model for silicate weathering, we find that there was large regional variability in runoff between glacial and interglacial periods, but that this regional variability was insufficient to shift global weathering fluxes. We suggest that this stability in weathering explains the observation that the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere by silicate weathering has been in approximate balance with CO2 degassing over the past 600,000 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]