Abstract
Produced on land by incomplete combustion of organic matter, black carbon (BC) enters the ocean by aerosol and river deposition. It has been postulated that BC resides in the marine dissolved organic carbon (DOC) pool before sedimentary deposition and may attribute to its great 14C age (1500–6500 14C years). Here we report the first radiocarbon measurements of BC in high molecular weight DOC (UDOM). BC exported from rivers is highly aromatic and <500 14C years old, while open ocean samples contain less aromatic BC and have an age of 18,000 ± 3,000 14C years. The low abundance of BC in UDOM (0.5–3.5%) suggests that it is more labile than presently believed and/or the low molecular weight DOC contains a larger proportion of aged BC.
Highlights
[1] Produced on land by incomplete combustion of organic matter, black carbon (BC) enters the ocean by aerosol and river deposition
BC isolated from open ocean sediments is up to 14,000 14C years older than non‐BC sedimentary organic carbon, suggesting that BC resides in an intermediate pool, such as marine dissolved organic carbon (DOC), prior to sedimentary deposition [Masiello and Druffel, 1998]
[8] The large proportion of marker compounds indicative of highly condensed aromatic carbon (B5CA and B6CA) produced from BC in Suwannee River DOC illustrates that terrigenous BC is condensed in its aromatic structure (Figure 1)
Summary
[1] Produced on land by incomplete combustion of organic matter, black carbon (BC) enters the ocean by aerosol and river deposition. BC isolated from open ocean sediments is up to 14,000 14C years older than non‐BC sedimentary organic carbon, suggesting that BC resides in an intermediate pool, such as marine dissolved organic carbon (DOC), prior to sedimentary deposition [Masiello and Druffel, 1998]. These samples represent a wide range of ocean locations, sources and ages of DOC and one river sample (Table S1 and Figure S3).
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