The unravelling of radiocarbon composition of organic carbon in river sediments to document past anthropogenic impacts on river systems

Abstract

As carriers of dissolved and particulate loads that connect continental surfaces to oceans, river systems play a major role in the global carbon cycle. Indeed, riverine particulate organic carbon (POC) is a melange of various origins characterized by their own ¹⁴C labeling. In addition, civil nuclear activities have brought new ¹⁴C source that remains poorly documented. We propose to unravel the Δ¹⁴C value of POC stored in a sedimentary archive collected downstream the most nuclearized European rivers (the Loire River). We postulate that riverine POC is a mixture of aquatic POC (which could be impacted by the liquid discharge from nuclear industry), terrestrial and petrogenic POC. With a combination of radiocarbon measurements, POC analyses and the palynofacies method, we assessed the respective Δ¹⁴C value of the POC origins. The gaps between the Δ¹⁴C values of the sedimentary POC and those of the atmosphere were the result of the dilution from dead-C, the freshwater reservoir effect imprinting the Δ¹⁴C of aquatic POC and the age and transit time of terrestrial POC within the catchment. Importantly, we consider that the unravelling of radiocarbon composition of riverine POC could be useful to determine either the transit time of material from source to sink, some past industrial or natural events, the resilience of the river system and milestones of the social and economic trajectory of a catchment. For the last three decades, riverine sediments could also act as a source of radiocarbon for the atmosphere.

Keywords: Catchments; Nuclear tests; Radiocarbon; Rivers; Trajectories; sédiments.