Donato Giovannelli and Costa Vetriani Publish Paper on Carbon Sequestration in Subduction Zones

Donato Giovannelli and Costantino Vetriani are co-authors of a multi-institution paper published last week in Nature. This paper reports how carbon sequestration in the forearc regions of subduction zones reduces CO2 transfer to the mantle and, eventually, its release from backarc volcanoes, with potentially relevant effects on the discharge of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Subsurface chemosynthetic microorganisms likely play an important role in CO2 sequestration in the forearc region, as they incorporate CO2 in their biomass and possibly participate in calcite deposition. This paper shows how plate tectonics and subsurface microbiology work in concert and affect the carbon budget on our planet.

Donato Giovannelli, now a faculty member at the University of Naples, Italy, led the Rutgers effort. Francesco Smedile (a former post-doc in Costa's lab, now at the Italian National Research Council) and Sushmita Patwardhan (a recent PhD graduate in the oceanography program from Costa's lab, now at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle) also co-authored the paper.

Read the press release at Rutgers Today
Read the paper in Nature