ArticleNature geoscience2023
Rapid loss of complex polymers and pyrogenic carbon in subsoils under whole-soil warming.
Article in Nature geoscience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Elevated CONature communications · 2026Article
- Nonlinear temperature change responses shape soil organic carbon loss-gain transitions in global Mollisol croplands.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Organic carbon oxidation state shapes fermentative methanogenic microbiomes and controls greenhouse gas fluxes.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Patterns and drivers of soil microbial carbon use efficiency across soil depths in forest ecosystems.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Degradable film mulching increases soil carbon sequestration in major Chinese dryland agroecosystems.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Carbon gain in upper but loss in deeper cropland soils across China over the last four decades.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Subsoils contain more than half of soil organic carbon (SOC) and are expected to experience rapid warming in the coming decades. Yet our understanding of the stability of this vast carbon pool under global warming is uncertain. In particular, the fate of complex molecular structures (polymers) remains debated. Here we show that 4.5 years of whole-soil warming (+4 °C) resulted in less polymeric SOC (sum of specific polymers contributing to SOC) in the warmed subsoil (20-90 cm) relative to control, with no detectable change in topsoil. Warming stimulated the subsoil loss of lignin phenols (-17 ± 0%) derived from woody plant biomass, hydrolysable lipids cutin and suberin, derived from leaf and woody plant biomass (-28 ± 3%), and pyrogenic carbon (-37 ± 8%) produced during incomplete combustion. Given that these compounds have been proposed for long-term carbon sequestration, it is notable that they were rapidly lost in warmed soils. We conclude that complex polymeric carbon in subsoil is vulnerable to decomposition and propose that molecular structure alone may not protect compounds from degradation under future warming.
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