Carbon cycling refers to the set of biogeochemical processes that regulate the transformation, transport, and storage of carbon among major Earth system reservoirs, including the atmosphere, terrestrial biosphere, oceans, and lithosphere. It encompasses autotrophic carbon fixation, heterotrophic respiration, decomposition, sedimentation, weathering, and anthropogenic fluxes such as fossil fuel combustion and land-use change. Research on carbon cycling quantifies fluxes and pool sizes, characterizes feedbacks between carbon reservoirs and climate, and employs observational networks, isotopic tracers, and Earth system models to constrain budgets, residence times, and perturbation responses across temporal scales from diurnal to geologic.
Nearly two centuries of maize-based agriculture in the U.S. Midwest has halved soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks compared with tallgrass prairies native to the region. Replacing annual maize/soy cropping with perennial bioenergy ...
Agriculture
Aug 4, 2026
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9
YCNCC Science Communications Fellow Samantha Tracy recently sat down with Wong to discuss the influence of soil fertility on tropical forests and their responses to global change. The study is published in the journal New ...
Ecology
Aug 4, 2026
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12
Deeply rooted perennial plants may help build soil carbon (C) stocks, but most research has focused on shallow soils, resulting in gaps in our understanding of how the balance between decomposition and C inputs shifts and ...
Agriculture
Aug 4, 2026
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4
The processes that capture carbon from the atmosphere and store it on the seabed are crucial for climate balance. However, assessing these mechanisms is often complicated because it requires measurements ranging from the ...
Earth Sciences
Aug 3, 2026
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27
Permafrost in the Arctic stores large quantities of organic carbon. When frozen ground thaws or coastal sections erode, this carbon can enter the sea, where microorganisms can break it down and convert it into climate-damaging ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 31, 2026
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135
The ocean absorbs roughly a quarter of humanity's carbon dioxide emissions each year. Understanding how that happens, and how it might change, is essential for predicting our climate's future. To do that, scientists need ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 30, 2026
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6
Deploying ocean iron fertilization—a strategy for carbon dioxide capture—in higher latitudes rather than near the equator could reduce environmental impacts while still achieving removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 29, 2026
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161
Could taking plant biomass and burying it in the deep, anoxic parts of the ocean be a workable large-scale strategy for carbon sequestration? The concept has intrigued scientists for years, and now a recent international ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 28, 2026
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56
Most of the carbon released during Canada's record-breaking 2023 wildfire season came from burning soil and peat, rather than trees, according to new research from McMaster University.
Earth Sciences
Jul 27, 2026
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8
A new computer model is one of the first artificial intelligence tools to advance scientific discovery in agriculture and biogeochemistry and is 50 times more efficient than its predecessors, according to a study that offers ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Jul 27, 2026
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