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Creators/Authors contains: "Peucker‐Ehrenbrink, Bernhard"

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  1. Abstract The Amazon River exports over 10% of the global riverine dissolved organic carbon (DOC) flux to the ocean. However, several downstream clearwater tributaries, such as the Tapajós River, are typically not included in these measurements, omitting a crucial part of the Amazon carbon cycle. This study investigated near‐monthly DOC and dissolved organic matter (DOM) composition via optical, fluorescence spectroscopy, and ultra‐high resolution mass spectrometry (FT‐ICR MS) of the Tapajós River for 8 years (2016–2024) to better understand patterns and drivers of potential organic carbon export to the lower Amazon River. DOM composition and DOC export were driven by the seasonal flood pulse of the Tapajós River, exporting aromatic terrestrial DOM from the watershed during high discharge and internally produced algal or microbial DOM during dry periods. On average, we report that the Tapajós River exports 1.38 Tg DOC annually to the downstream Amazon mixing zone, representing an amount of DOC exported by other major world rivers such as the Yukon or Mekong River. Furthermore, organic carbon export varied interannually with less DOC exported during dry El Niño events and more algal‐derived DOM exported during bloom periods. Finally, as grassland and cropland landcover increased over the study period, we observed an average decrease in aromatic DOM and an increase in microbially processed fluorophores. Our study suggests that temperature, precipitation, and anthropogenic land use changes in clearwater rivers will impact carbon export across the lower Amazon River network. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 1, 2026
  2. Abstract Iron (Fe) availability impacts marine primary productivity, potentially influencing the efficiency of the biological carbon pump. Stable Fe isotope analysis has emerged as a tool to understand how Fe is sourced and cycled in the water column; however its application to sediment records is complicated by overlapping isotope signatures of different sources and uncertainties in establishing chronologies. To overcome these challenges, we integrate Fe and osmium isotope measurements with multi‐element geochemical analysis and statistical modeling. We apply this approach to reconstruct the history of Fe delivery to the South Pacific from three pelagic clay sequences spanning 93 million years. Our analysis reveals five principal Fe sources—dust, distal background, two distinct hydrothermal inputs, and a magnesium‐rich volcanic ash. Initially, hydrothermal inputs dominated Fe deposition, but as the sites migrated away from their respective mid‐ocean ridges, other sources became prominent. Notably, from 66 to 40 million years ago (Ma), distal background Fe was the primary source before a shift to increasing dust dominance around 30 Ma. This transition implies that Fe in South Pacific seawater has been dust‐dominated since ≈30 Ma, despite extremely low dust deposition rates today. We speculate that the shift to episodic and low Fe fluxes in the South Pacific and Southern Ocean over the Cenozoic helped shape an ecological niche that favored phytoplankton that adapted to these conditions, such as diatoms. Our analysis highlights how Fe delivery to the ocean is driven by large‐scale tectonic and climatic shifts, while also influencing climate through its integral role in marine phytoplankton and Earth's biogeochemical cycles. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 1, 2026
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    Abstract Groundwater-derived solute fluxes to the ocean have long been assumed static and subordinate to riverine fluxes, if not neglected entirely, in marine isotope budgets. Here we present concentration and isotope data for Li, Mg, Ca, Sr, and Ba in coastal groundwaters to constrain the importance of groundwater discharge in mediating the magnitude and isotopic composition of terrestrially derived solute fluxes to the ocean. Data were extrapolated globally using three independent volumetric estimates of groundwater discharge to coastal waters, from which we estimate that groundwater-derived solute fluxes represent, at a minimum, 5% of riverine fluxes for Li, Mg, Ca, Sr, and Ba. The isotopic compositions of the groundwater-derived Mg, Ca, and Sr fluxes are distinct from global riverine averages, while Li and Ba fluxes are isotopically indistinguishable from rivers. These differences reflect a strong dependence on coastal lithology that should be considered a priority for parameterization in Earth-system models. 
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  5. Expansion (version 2.0) of the original Land2Sea database of exorheic rivers (Peucker-Ehrenbrink, 2009, doi:10.1029/2008GC002356) that contains information on 1519 rivers, with additional literature estimates of basin size, water discharge (runoff) under current conditions and prior to human intervention, suspended sediment discharge under current conditions and prior to human intervention, estimate of sediment bedload flux, dissolved strontium concentration and radiogenic isotope value as well as particulate (silt or clay) neodymium concentration, isotope composition and Nd model ages. A large addition to the original river database that contains a significant amount of data from the compilation of Meybeck and Ragu (1996) is from Milliman and Farnsworth (2011). The compilation is not yet geo-referenced. The 2156 rivers are sorted alphabetically within each large-scale drainage region (Graham et al., 1999, 2000). In addition, the compilation includes data on sizes of, and sediment discharge from 48 small islands in Oceania with very high sediment yields. Any errors in transcribing data or converting units from their primary sources into this compilation are entirely mine. Acknowledgements: BPE acknowledges financial support from NSR-EAR-0087697, -0125873, -1226818 and ICER-1639557, as well as from WHOI's Investment in Research and Development Fund. 
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  6. Terrestrial vegetation and soils hold three times more carbon than the atmosphere. Much debate concerns how anthropogenic activity will perturb these surface reservoirs, potentially exacerbating ongoing changes to the climate system. Uncertainties specifically persist in extrapolating point-source observations to ecosystem-scale budgets and fluxes, which require consideration of vertical and lateral processes on multiple temporal and spatial scales. To explore controls on organic carbon (OC) turnover at the river basin scale, we present radiocarbon ( 14 C) ages on two groups of molecular tracers of plant-derived carbon—leaf-wax lipids and lignin phenols—from a globally distributed suite of rivers. We find significant negative relationships between the 14 C age of these biomarkers and mean annual temperature and precipitation. Moreover, riverine biospheric-carbon ages scale proportionally with basin-wide soil carbon turnover times and soil 14 C ages, implicating OC cycling within soils as a primary control on exported biomarker ages and revealing a broad distribution of soil OC reactivities. The ubiquitous occurrence of a long-lived soil OC pool suggests soil OC is globally vulnerable to perturbations by future temperature and precipitation increase. Scaling of riverine biospheric-carbon ages with soil OC turnover shows the former can constrain the sensitivity of carbon dynamics to environmental controls on broad spatial scales. Extracting this information from fluvially dominated sedimentary sequences may inform past variations in soil OC turnover in response to anthropogenic and/or climate perturbations. In turn, monitoring riverine OC composition may help detect future climate-change–induced perturbations of soil OC turnover and stocks. 
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  7. Abstract EarthCube Data Discovery Studio (DDStudio) is a crossdomain geoscience data discovery and exploration portal. It indexes over 1.65 million metadata records harvested from 40+ sources and utilizes a configurable metadata augmentation pipeline to enhance metadata content, using text analytics and an integrated geoscience ontology. Metadata enhancers add keywords with identifiers that map resources to science domains, geospatial features, measured variables, and other characteristics. The pipeline extracts spatial location and temporal references from metadata to generate structured spatial and temporal extents, maintaining provenance of each metadata enhancement, and allowing user validation. The semantically enhanced metadata records are accessible as standard ISO 19115/19139 XML documents via standard search interfaces. A search interface supports spatial, temporal, and text‐based search, as well as functionality for users to contribute, standardize, and update resource descriptions, and to organize search results into shareable collections. DDStudio bridges resource discovery and exploration by letting users launch Jupyter notebooks residing on several platforms for any discovered datasets or dataset collection. DDStudio demonstrates how linking search results from the catalog directly to software tools and environments reduces time to science in a series of examples from several geoscience domains. URL: datadiscoverystudio.org 
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