Anthropogenic Water Withdrawals Modify Freshwater Inorganic Carbon Fluxes across the United States.

ABSTRACT: Quantifying inorganic carbon fluxes to and from freshwater environments is essential for the accurate determination of the total amount of carbon exported to both the atmosphere and oceans. However, understanding of how anthropogenic freshwater withdrawals perturb land-freshwater-ocean and freshwater-atmosphere inorganic carbon fluxes is limited. Using the United States (US) as an exemplar, we estimate that fresh surface water withdrawals across the country during the year 2015 resulted in a median gross dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) retention flux of 8.2 (uncertainty range: 6.7-9.9) Tg C yr^-1, equivalent to 28.3% of the total export of DIC to the oceans from US rivers. The median gross retention flux due to fresh groundwater withdrawals was 6.9 (uncertainty range: 5.3-8.8) T

SUBMITTER: Flint EM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11883805 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature