Long-term rates of chemical weathering and physical erosion from cosmogenic nuclides and geochemical mass balance

Abstract

Quantifying long-term rates of chemical weathering and physical erosion is important for understanding the long-term evolution of soils, landscapes, and Earth's climate. Here we describe how long-term chemical weathering rates can be measured for actively eroding landscapes using cosmogenic nuclides together with a geochemical mass balance of weathered soil and parent rock. We tested this approach in the Rio Icacos watershed, Puerto Rico, where independent studies have estimated weathering rates over both short and long timescales. Results from the cosmogenic/mass balance method are consistent with three independent sets of weathering rate estimates, thus confirming that this approach yields realistic measurements of long-term weathering rates. This approach can separately quantify weathering rates from saprolite and from overlying soil as components of the total. At Rio Icacos, nearly 50% of Si weathering occurs as rock is converted to saprolite; in contrast, nearly 100% of Al weathering occurs in the soil. Physical erosion rates are measured as part of our mass balance approach, making it particularly useful for studying interrelationships between chemical weathering and physical erosion. Our data show that chemical weathering rates are tightly coupled with physical erosion rates, such that the relationship between climate and chemical weathering rates may be obscured by site-to-site differences in the rate that minerals are supplied to soil by physical erosion of rock. One can normalize for variations in physical erosion rates using the “chemical depletion fraction,” which measures the fraction of total denudation that is accounted for by chemical weathering. This measure of chemical weathering intensity increases with increasing average temperature and precipitation in data from climatically diverse granitic sites, including tropical Rio Icacos and six temperate sites in the Sierra Nevada, California. Hence, across a wide range of climate regimes, analysis of chemical depletion fractions appears to effectively account for site-to-site differences in physical erosion rates, which would otherwise obscure climatic effects on chemical weathering rates. Our results show that by quantifying rates of physical erosion and chemical weathering together, our mass balance approach can be used to determine the relative importance of climatic and nonclimatic factors in regulating long-term chemical weathering rates.