Dissolved organic carbon is the most important intermediary in the global carbon cycle.
When La Niña brings unusually warm waters and abnormal air pressure to the Pacific Ocean, the resulting weather patterns create an increase in the carbon export from the Amazon River, new research from Florida State University has found.
In a normal year, the Amazon River exports about 10% of the world’s riverine dissolved organic carbon into the ocean. The study, which was published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles, shows that the 2011-2012 La Niña event added an additional 2.77 teragrams of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) per year to the outflow from the Amazon River. That’s equivalent to the amount exported from the Mississippi River in a typical year.
“That’s a big deal, because as global temperature and precipitation patterns continue to change, we’re missing out on this highly sensitive pool of organic carbon coming from the Amazon River that we previously didn’t account for in any of the estimates,” said doctoral student Martin Kurek, the paper’s lead author.
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