Does Organic Carbon Stored in Soils Reacts to Rising Temperature?

Do you know that soils globally stores more than twice as much carbon as the atmosphere?. Well, now you know.

As a result of soils massive carbon storage capacity, carbon uptake and release by soils constitutes a strong regulator of atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2).

MARUM - Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, University of Bremen funded a research that study the sensitivity of soil carbon, which is directly related to the release of CO2 from soils, under a changing climate, such as rising temperatures and/or variations in the hydrological cycle.

To further explain the mechanism behind the phenomenon, one of the researchers Dr. Vera Meyer highlighted that "Microbes that break down organic matter are generally more active under warm and humid conditions, so the carbon content in tropical soils responds very quickly to climatic changes. Some studies report a main influence of changing hydroclimatic conditions, while in others temperature plays the main role,"

They carried out the research by analyzing the age of land-derived organic matter that was transported from soils from the Nile to the Mediterranean and deposited near the river mouth.

The research findings shows that the ages of the land carbon changed only slightly with changes in precipitation(rain, snow) and the associated changes in runoff, but reacted strongly to changes in temperature.

Additionally, the change in ages due to the temperature increase after the last ice age was significantly greater than expected.

According to the researchers, This means that the post-glacial global warming drastically accelerated the decomposition of organic matter by microorganisms in soils and caused a much stronger release of CO2 from sub-tropical soils than predicted by carbon cycle models.

The effect of this phenomenon is not only limited to the present but also a threat to the future.

Want to get a glimpse of the complete research?, You can access it through;

Vera D. Meyer, Peter Köhler, Nadine T. Smit, Julius S. Lipp, Bingbing Wei, Gesine Mollenhauer, Enno Schefuß. Dominant control of temperature on (sub-)tropical soil carbon turnover. Nature Communications, 2025; 16 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-59013-9

Photo Credit: Meta AI

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