Comment on "Physical Model for the Decay and Preservation of Marine Organic Carbon"

doi:10.1126/science.1148589

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Science 21 March 2008:
Vol. 319. no. 5870, p. 1616
DOI: 10.1126/science.1148589

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Technical Comments

Comment on "Physical Model for the Decay and Preservation of Marine Organic Carbon"

Bernard P. Boudreau¹^*, Carol Arnosti², Bo Barker Jørgensen³ and Donald E. Canfield⁴

¹ Department of Oceanography, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4J1, Canada.
² Department of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599–3300, USA.
³ Max Planck Institut für Marine Mikrobiologie, Celsiusstrasse 1, D-28359 Bremen, Germany.
⁴ Nordic Center for Earth Evolution and Institute of Biology, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M, Denmark.

Fig. 1. Plot of the apparent first-order decay constant, , for organic matter in sediments as a function of time, as established with data from Middelburg (10). The dotted green line is Middelburg's best fit with a power law, i.e., = 0.16±0.02t^{-0.95 ± 0.01}. The red solid line is the prediction made with the continuum version of the intrinsic-reactivity model (11), using a gamma distribution for rate constant values and parameter values for ${nu}$ and a taken from (9), i.e., = 0.125 ± 0.013 (0.0003 + t)^–1. The dashed blue line is the predicted relationship from (1), i.e., = 0.2 t^–1. All of these equations capture the trend in these data. [View Larger Version of this Image (32K GIF file)]