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Published February 7, 2014 | public
Journal Article

Rapid Soil Production and Weathering in the Southern Alps, New Zealand

Abstract

Evaluating conflicting theories about the influence of mountains on carbon dioxide cycling and climate requires understanding weathering fluxes from tectonically uplifting landscapes. The lack of soil production and weathering rate measurements in Earth's most rapidly uplifting mountains has made it difficult to determine whether weathering rates increase or decline in response to rapid erosion. Beryllium-10 concentrations in soils from the western Southern Alps, New Zealand, demonstrate that soil is produced from bedrock more rapidly than previously recognized, at rates up to 2.5 millimeters per year. Weathering intensity data further indicate that soil chemical denudation rates increase proportionally with erosion rates. These high weathering rates support the view that mountains play a key role in global-scale chemical weathering and thus have potentially important implications for the global carbon cycle.

Additional Information

© 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received for publication 19 August 2013. Accepted for publication 30 December 2013. Published Online January 16 2014. We thank the NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program (OISE-1015454 to I.J.L.), Royal Society of New Zealand, NASA Earth and Space Science fellowship program, Geological Society of America, and University of Washington Department of Earth and Space Sciences for support; A. Heimsath, J. Roering, F. von Blanckenburg, and N. Hovius for stimulating conversations; H. Greenberg for geographic information system support; K. Larsen for assistance collecting sediment samples; R. Sletten for assistance importing samples; A. Heimsath and A. J. West for thorough reviews; and the New Zealand Department of Conservation for granting access to study sites. Data are available in the supplementary materials. I.J.L. and P.C.A. designed and planned the field component of the study; I.J.L., A.E., and B.M. conducted the field sampling; A.E. described soils; and I.J.L. and J.O.S. separated ^(10)Be. I.J.L. wrote the manuscript, with input from all coauthors.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 26, 2023