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Abstract The development of life on Earth has been enabled by its volatile-rich surface. The volatile budget of Earth’s surface is controlled by the balance between ingassing (for example, via subduction) and outgassing (for example, through magmatic and tectonic processes). Although volatiles within Earth’s interior are relatively depleted compared to CI chondrites, the total amount of volatiles within Earth is still substantial due to its vast size. However, the relative extent of diffuse degassing from Earth’s interior, not directly related to volcanism, is not well constrained. Here we use dissolved helium and high-precision argon isotopes combined with radiocarbon of dissolved inorganic carbon in groundwater from the Columbia Plateau Regional Aquifer (Washington and Idaho, USA). We identify mantle and crustal volatile sources and quantify their fluxes to the surface. Excess helium and argon in the groundwater indicate a mixture of sub-continental lithospheric mantle and crustal sources, suggesting that passive degassing of the sub-continental lithospheric mantle may be an important, yet previously unrecognized, outgassing process. This finding that considerable outgassing may occur even in volcanically quiescent parts of the crust is essential for quantifying the long-term global volatile mass balance. 

Billions of people rely upon groundwater for drinking water and agriculture, yet predicting how climate change may affect aquifer storage remains challenging. To gain insight beyond the short historical record, we reconstruct changes in groundwater levels in western North America during the last glacial termination (LGT, ~20 to 11 thousand years ago) using noble gas isotopes. Our reconstructions indicate remarkable stability of water table depth in a Pacific Northwest aquifer throughout the LGT despite increasing precipitation, closely matching independent Earth system model (ESM) simulations. In the American Southwest, ESM simulations and noble gas isotopes both suggest a pronounced LGT decline in water table depth in in response to decreasing precipitation, indicating distinct regional groundwater responses to climate. Despite the hydrologic simplicity of ESMs, their agreement with proxy reconstructions of past water table depth suggests that these models hold value in understanding groundwater dynamics and projecting large-scale aquifer responses to climate forcing.