Natural ocean alkalinization through erosion of glacial till and weathering at the seafloor: solid phase data from AL543

DOI

Climate change-driven deglaciation and erosion in high-latitude regions enhance the flux of terrigenous material to the coastal ocean. Newly exposed land surfaces left behind by retreating glaciers are covered by glacial till, which is rich in fine-grained minerals. Many of these minerals are undersaturated in seawater and thus prone to dissolution (i.e., seafloor weathering). Consequently, intensified erosion and mineral weathering may act as an additional CO₂ sink while supplying alkalinity to coastal waters.To evaluate this hypothesis, we carried out a sediment geochemical study in the southwestern Baltic Sea, where coastal erosion of glacial till is the dominant source of terrigenous material to offshore depocenters. We analyzed glacial till from coastal cliffs, sediments, and pore waters for major element composition using inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy and an elemental analyzer. Water samples were further analyzed for dissolved redox species and dissolved silica by photometry and ion chromatography. These data were then used to quantify mineral dissolution and precipitation processes and to assess their net effect on inorganic carbon cycling.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.986505
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.986505
Provenance
Creator Scholz, Florian ORCID logo; Wallmann, Klaus (ORCID: 0000-0002-1795-376X)
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2025
Funding Reference Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Bonn https://doi.org/10.13039/501100001659 Crossref Funder ID 283168947 https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/283168947 Iron Cycling in Continental Margin Sediments and the Nutrient and Oxygen Balance of the Ocean (ICONOX)
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 681 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (9.946W, 54.472S, 10.313E, 54.748N); Baltic Sea; The Little Belt
Temporal Coverage Begin 2020-08-24T07:17:59Z
Temporal Coverage End 2020-08-28T07:42:00Z