Carbon export by erosion of the biosphere: The role of earthquake-triggered landslides

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Does mountain building influence the global carbon cycle and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere, and hence modify Earth's climate? This question is at the heart of a long-standing debate as to how erosion and weathering act to draw down CO2, countering the input of CO2 from volcanoes over millions of years. Earthquakes offer a direct way of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, but how this happens and how large the impact might be has remained poorly understood. Ground shaking during earthquakes can trigger tens of thousands of landslides, which strip large amounts of carbon from soil and plants in mountain forests. Depending on the amount of carbon involved, and what happens to it, earthquakes could be a way in which mountain building drives the global carbon cycle. If the carbon removed from mountain forests reaches rivers, it can be transported in muddy waters downstream and into a long-term sink (storage) of CO2 following burial in sediments. Our research aims to quantify, for the first time, whether large earthquakes could increase the erosion and river export of carbon from mountain forests. Until now, it has proved very challenging to measure the impact of these extreme and unpredictable events in river systems. This is because we need samples collected from rivers before and after earthquakes, in order to use geochemical measurements to fingerprint the carbon source and measure the carbon flux. The research team has recently been involved in the only case where this has been done, after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China which triggered over fifty thousand landslides. There, we found that the carbon flux in a mountain river increased significantly in the four years which followed the earthquake and the associated catastrophic landsliding. Our work from Wenchuan sets the foundation for this research proposal, demonstrating that carbon mobilised by earthquake landslides does reach rivers. However, we expect the impacts to last for ten years, or even hundreds, and Wenchuan is just a single example. It is clear we need other data, and a new approach in order to fill this research gap. We will study multiple large earthquakes, and make measurements over decades to centuries before and after each earthquake. To do this, we will combine landslide maps from historical earthquakes around the world, with some of the best studied records of sediment export following large earthquakes in lakes. The well-dated and well-understood lake sediment records come from the western Southern Alps, New Zealand. They record the response of the mountain landscape to four large earthquakes over a thousand years. We will use geochemistry techniques to fingerprint and track the carbon sourced from vegetation and soil (rather than eroded from bedrock) and combine these with measurements of sediment flux to calculate carbon flux. This can be done for four earthquakes in two lakes, as well as during the 'background' periods before and long after the catastrophic landsliding. The datasets will allow us to confidently quantify how earthquakes increase carbon export from forests from a 'background' state. We will use the new data and our understanding of the main processes operating to build a model to allow us to assess the role of earthquakes for carbon flux in mountains on longer timescales. For the first time, we will be able to apply the model around the world to mountains which experience earthquakes. We will account for changing earthquake size and how often they happen, and the amount of carbon in the forest and the rate at which it is degraded in landslide deposits. We will also consider how different rainfall patterns in river catchments can change the flux of carbon. With these novel insights, we will be able to quantify how earthquakes impact the carbon cycle, CO2 and the evolution of Earth's climate.