design-construction-an-experimental-setup-to-enhance-mineral

Design and Construction of an Experimental Setup to Enhance Mineral Weathering through the Activity of Soil Organisms

Enhanced weathering (EW) is an emerging carbon dioxide (CO2) removal technology that can contribute to climate change mitigation. This technology relies ...

temperature-response-soil-organic-matter-decomposition-rates

Temperature Response of Soil Organic Matter Decomposition Rates: Construction and Applications of a Temperature Gradient Block

Soil is the Earth's largest carbon (C) reservoir, holding nearly twice as much C as the atmosphere. Climate change-induced temperature increases could ...

Wageningen University & Research

Alkalinity, the excess of proton acceptors over donors, plays a major role in ocean chemistry, in buffering and in calcium carbonate precipitation and dissolution. Understanding alkalinity dynamics is pivotal to quantify ocean carbon dioxide uptake during times of global change. Here we review ocean alkalinity and its role in ocean buffering as well as the biogeochemical processes governing alkalinity and pH in the ocean. We show that it is important to distinguish between measurable titration alkalinity and charge balance alkalinity that is used to quantify calcification and carbonate dissolution and needed to understand the impact of biogeochemical processes on components of the carbon dioxide system. A general treatment of ocean buffering and quantification via sensitivity factors is presented and used to link existing buffer and sensitivity factors. The impact of individual biogeochemical processes on ocean alkalinity and pH is discussed and quantified using these sensitivity factors. Processes governing ocean alkalinity on longer time scales such as carbonate compensation, (reversed) silicate weathering, and anaerobic mineralization are discussed and used to derive a close-to-balance ocean alkalinity budget for the modern ocean.

Ocean Alkalinity, Buffering and Biogeochemical Processes.

A number of negative emission technologies (NETs) have been proposed to actively remove CO from the atmosphere, with enhanced silicate weathering (ESW) as a relatively new NET with considerable climate change mitigation potential. Models calibrated to ESW rates in lab experiments estimate the global potential for inorganic carbon sequestration by ESW at about 0.5-5 Gt CO  year , suggesting ESW could be an important component of the future NETs mix. In real soils, however, weathering rates may differ strongly from lab conditions. Research on natural weathering has shown that biota such as plants, microbes, and macro-invertebrates can strongly affect weathering rates, but biotic effects were excluded from most ESW lab assessments. Moreover, ESW may alter soil organic carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions by influencing physicochemical and biological processes, which holds the potential to perpetuate even larger negative emissions. Here, we argue that it is likely that the climate change mitigation effect of ESW will be governed by biological processes, emphasizing the need to put these processes on the agenda of this emerging research field.

Is the climate change mitigation effect of enhanced silicate weathering governed by biological processes?

The optimization of enhanced mineral weathering as a carbon dioxide removal technology requires a comprehensive understanding of what drives mineral weathering. These drivers can be abiotic and biotic and can interact with each other. Therefore, in this study, an extensive 8-week column experiment was set up to investigate 30 potential drivers of mineral weathering simultaneously.

ArticleTotal : 2	Year
Publication title Cited by 10	2023
Publication title	2026

Article	Year
Ocean Alkalinity, Buffering and Biogeochemical Processes. Reviews of geophysics (Washington, D.C. : 1985)\| PubMed ID: 32879922	2020
Is the climate change mitigation effect of enhanced silicate weathering governed by biological processes? Global change biology\| PubMed ID: 34773318	2022
Machine learning-based identification of key biotic and abiotic drivers of mineral weathering rate in a complex enhanced weathering experiment. Open research Europe\| PubMed ID: 40792254	2025

Mathilde Hagens

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