Explosive volcanic eruptions can act as carbon sinks
(2025) Nature Communications — Vol. 16, n° 1 (2025)
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- Authors
Biass, Sébastien 
- Abstract
- Volcanic soils, covering only ~1% of the Earth’s land, store over 5%of the global soil organic C stock. The frequent burial of these soils by tephra fallout from explosive volcanic eruptions is a critical but poorly quantified C storage process in soils from volcanically active regions. Using field measurements, we demonstrate that single eruptions can bury substantial amounts of stable organic carbon in soils.We develop amodelling framework and estimate that, in Ecuador alone, at least 1.1 Pg C has been stored in volcanic soils repeatedly affected by tephra deposition during the Holocene. This stock of tephraburied soil organic carbon exceeds the cumulative CO2 emissions from the source eruptions. Here, we show that explosive volcanism, through the repeated burial of organic C in volcanic soils, acts as a significant regional C sink over time, ultimately averaging to net C-negative events.
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Citations
Delmelle, P., Biass, S., Paque, M., & Lobet, B. (2025). Explosive volcanic eruptions can act as carbon sinks. Nature Communications, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-59692-4 (Original work published 2025)