Exploring soil organic matter-mineral interactions: mechanistic insights at the nanometer and molecular length scales

Abstract:

With elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to anthropogenic emissions and disruption to the carbon cycle, the effects of climate change are being accelerated. Approximately 80% of Earth’s terrestrial organic carbon is stored in soil, and the residence time of this carbon can range from hours to millenia. Understanding the dynamics of this carbon pool in the carbon cycle is crucial to both predicting climate and sustaining ecosystem services.

Soil organic carbon is known to be strongly associated with high surface area clay minerals. The nature of these interactions is not well understood primarily due to the heterogeneity of soil, as much of the current knowledge relies on experiments that take a top-down approach using bulk experimental measurements. Our work seeks to probe physical, chemical, and molecular-level interactions at the organic-mineral interface using a bottom-up approach that establishes a model system where complexity can be built in systematically. By performing in situ techniques such as dynamic force spectroscopy, a technique where organic molecules can be brought into contact with mineral surfaces in a controlled manner using an atomic force microscope, we demonstrate the ability to mechanistically probe the energy landscape of individual organic molecules with mineral surfaces. We demonstrate the ability to measure the binding energies of soil-inspired organic functional groups (including carboxylic acid, amine, methyl, and phosphate) with clay and mineral surfaces as a function of solution chemistry. This effort can provide researchers with both guiding principles about carbon dynamics at the sub-nanometer length scale and insights into early aggregation events, where organic-mineral interactions play a significant role.