🎙️ En este podcast te cuento cómo el aumento de temperaturas está afectando a la capacidad de los suelos subárticos para retener carbono y nitrógeno, y por qué eso debería importarnos a todos.

👉 Escúchalo aquí: www.cartv.es/aragonradio/...
@aragonradio.bsky.social

Thank you very much Juan!🙏🏼

10/ A joined effort of @creaf.cat @ter-cemess.bsky.social with @jpreixach.bsky.social @andreasrichter.bsky.social and other excellent researchers

👉 dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb....

#Science #Soils #Ecosystems #Nitrogen #Carbon

9/ 🌍 Takeaway:
Climate warming doesn’t just melt ice — it unlocks nitrogen and carbon from soils, undermining the resilience of northern ecosystems.

To protect the climate, we must also protect the silent work that soil does every day. 🌱🌾

8/ ⚠️ Our study highlights a hidden risk of climate change:
👉 Not just thawing permafrost, but also the weakening of the natural soil systems that stabilize nutrients and carbon over time.

These losses may be irreversible.

7/ 💡 Why does this matter?

Because northern soils store more carbon than all the Earth’s vegetation and the atmosphere combined.

If we lose the nitrogen that helps keep this carbon in place, we risk amplifying climate change — a dangerous feedback loop.

6/ 🧮 For every 1ºC of warming:

Plants gained only 0.14% more nitrogen

Soil microbes and fine roots lost nearly 2%

Non-extractable soil nitrogen dropped by up to 2.6%

➡️ These losses lead to proportional soil carbon losses.

5/ 🌱 Yes, warming increased aboveground plant growth and nitrogen uptake during the summer.

But this wasn’t enough to compensate for the losses underground.

💔 In other words: plants are trying, but they can’t keep up.

4/ 🐛 Microbes and plant roots normally act like a sponge, soaking up nitrogen during snowmelt and slowly releasing it when plants start growing.

But warming shrinks these sponges, causing nitrogen to leak from the system when it's needed most.

3/ 🧪 We used 15N isotopic tracers and geothermal warming in Iceland (up to +12ºC!) to track how nitrogen moves between plants, microbes, and soil over the seasons.

This gave us a detailed picture of how warming disrupts nitrogen retention in the real world.

2/ 💥 We found that warming weakens the soil’s ability to “lock in” nitrogen — especially in the long-term storage form called “non-extractable nitrogen”.

This is bad news, because nitrogen is essential for plant growth, and its loss affects carbon storage too.

1/ 🌡️ Soils in the subarctic store vast amounts of carbon and nitrogen.

They act like a climate savings account, keeping carbon locked away for thousands of years.

But what happens to this savings account when the planet heats up?