Peatlands are leaking ancient carbon into the atmosphere, and scientists cannot yet say exactly how or why. This project aims to build new instruments that can read the chemical signatures left behind by the microbes that control methane and carbon dioxide production in waterlogged soils. Today, those microbial processes remain a black box: the largest natural source of methane on Earth, yet poorly understood because existing tools cannot measure the isotopic fingerprints of the key bacterial and archaeal molecules involved. The team will develop a transformative analytical method to detect those fingerprints, then test it in modern peatlands under controlled changes to temperature, acidity, and food supply. Finally, they will apply the same technique to geological archives—peat and lignite layers spanning decades to millions of years—to see how past climate shifts rewired wetland carbon cycles. If successful, the work will reveal the mechanistic rules that govern whether peatlands store carbon or release it as greenhouse gases. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application, but understanding those rules could eventually improve climate models that underpin national carbon budgets and land-use policy.
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CERES will integrate analytical innovation, biogeochemistry in modern contexts, and geological archives to holistically evaluate how climate change affects peatland carbon cycling across multiple timescales. Greenhouse gases shaped Earth history, impacting both climate and ecosystems; ongoing anthropogenic emissions are doing the same. These include impacts on the microbially mediated processes that govern the chemical state of our planet and act as climate feedbacks. Soil microorganisms, for example, account for the largest natural methane flux, and yet these processes remain poorly understood, mediated by multiple environmental factors. Insight can be derived from geological archives that document the timescale-dependent responses of biogeochemical systems to environmental perturbations. Such studies on peat and lignites provide tantalising insights into climate-driven disruption of the carbon cycle, but the underlying mechanisms remain unresolved. This critical knowledge gap arises from our inability to determine the isotopic signatures of the most diagnostic biomarkers. Therefore, we will: 1) Develop new instrumentation for the isotopic determination of large bacterial and archaeal biomolecules. This is a transformative expansion of our biomarker toolkit as our analytical window expands from low to highly diagnostic compounds. 2) Apply these new methods to modern peatlands, examining biomarker isotopic compositions in the field as well as in experiments in response to manipulation of pH, temperature and substrate. 3) Apply our new biomarker methods and understanding to the geological past. Working across decadal to multi-million year timescales, we will unlock the mechanistic controls underlying ancient reorganisations of wetland carbon cycling. Through these WPs, CERES will probe how microbial metabolism, and hence biogeochemical cycles, operate(d) on the Earth today, through its history, and in response to rapid global warming.
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