Climate control on soil-landscape development in tropical volcanic islands
(2023) British Society for Geomorphology Annual Conference — Location: Edinburgh (4.September.2023)
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- et. al.
- Abstract
- Tropical volcanic islands are global hotspots of chemical weathering. In the tropics, the elevated temperatures and moisture availability facilitate weathering and CO2 drawdown, solute and nutrient fluxes, and volcanic landforms are often characterized by steep slopes and rapid erosion rates exposing fresh mineral surfaces to weathering agents. Weathering of volcanic rocks such as basalt may account for as much as 30 to 35% of global atmospheric CO2 consumption by chemical weathering, even though the areal proportion of volcanic rocks is only about 6% of the total exorheic land area. Volcanic soil systems evolve over time through interactions between climate, parent material, topography and biota. Our mechanistic understanding of these interactions, and their role in basalt weathering is far from complete. By working in the Galapagos Islands, we have the opportunity to better constrain soil-landscape development over millennial timescales based on empirical data from pristine soil ecosystems. In this talk, I will present data on basalt weathering from Santa Cruz Island, located in the central part of the Galapagos Archipelago, and illustrate how novel approaches contribute to obtain quantitative measures of soil weathering, physical erosion, topography and vegetation development. The monitoring sites cover a 10-fold increase in median annual precipitation which enabled us to quantify the (hydro)climate effects on soil-landscape development.
- Affiliations
Citations
Vanacker, V., & et al. (2023). Climate control on soil-landscape development in tropical volcanic islands. British Society for Geomorphology Annual Conference, Edinburgh. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/218292