A team from the Earth and Life Institute publishes an article in Nature Communications

Pierre Delmelle, Sébastien Biass, Mathilde Paque, and Benjamin Lobet have just published an article in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.

Entitled "Explosive volcanic eruptions can act as carbon sinks", the article demonstrates that single volcanic eruptions can bury substantial amounts of stable organic carbon in soils.

The article is available in open access on the Nature Communications website.

A press release was written in French to popularize the article.

The press release gave way to several press articles, notably in Le Soir and on the RTBF website.

Abstract

Volcanic soils, covering only ~1% of the Earth’s land, store over 5% of the global soil organic C stock. The frequent burial of these soils by tephra fallout from explosive volcanic eruptions is a critical but poorly quantified C storage process in soils from volcanically active regions. Using field measurements, we demonstrate that single eruptions can bury substantial amounts of stable organic carbon in soils. We develop a modelling framework and estimate that, in Ecuador alone, at least 1.1 Pg C has been stored in volcanic soils repeatedly affected by tephra deposition during the Holocene. This stock of tephra-buried soil organic carbon exceeds the cumulative CO2 emissions from the source eruptions. Here, we show that explosive volcanism, through the repeated burial of organic C in volcanic soils, acts as a significant regional C sink over time, ultimately averaging to net C-negative events.

Reference

Delmelle, P., Biass, S., Paque, M. et al. Explosive volcanic eruptions can act as carbon sinks. Nat Commun 16, 4306 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-59692-4