Title
Mountain ranges, climate and weathering. Do orogens strengthen or weaken the silicate weathering carbon sink?
Date Issued
01 July 2018
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Université Toulouse III
Publisher(s)
Elsevier B.V.
Abstract
The role of mountains in the geological evolution of the carbon cycle has been intensively debated for the last decades. Mountains are thought to increase the local physical erosion, which in turns promotes silicate weathering, organic carbon transport and burial, and release of sulfuric acid by dissolution of sulfides. In this contribution, we explore the impact of mountain ranges on silicate weathering. Mountains modify the global pattern of atmospheric circulation as well as the local erosion conditions. Using an IPCC-class climate model, we first estimate the climatic impact of mountains by comparing the present day climate with the climate when all the continents are assumed to be flat. We then use these climate output to calculate weathering changes when mountains are present or absent, using standard expression for physical erosion and a 1D vertical model for rock weathering. We found that large-scale climate changes and enhanced rock supply by erosion due to mountain uplift have opposite effect, with similar orders of magnitude. A thorough testing of the weathering model parameters by data-model comparison shows that best-fit parameterizations lead to a decrease of weathering rate in the absence of mountain by about 20%. However, we demonstrate that solutions predicting an increase in weathering in the absence of mountain cannot be excluded. A clear discrimination between the solutions predicting an increase or a decrease in global weathering is pending on the improvement of the existing global databases for silicate weathering. Nevertheless, imposing a constant and homogeneous erosion rate for models without relief, we found that weathering decrease becomes unequivocal for very low erosion rates (below 10 t/km2/yr). We conclude that further monitoring of continental silicate weathering should be performed with a spatial distribution allowing to discriminate between the various continental landscapes (mountains, plains …).
Start page
174
End page
185
Volume
493
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Geociencias, Multidisciplinar
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85046474359
Source
Earth and Planetary Science Letters
ISSN of the container
0012821X
Sponsor(s)
This research was supported by the ANR INTOCC.
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus