1 Burial of Organic Carbon in Lakes

Carbon burial is an important process, not only as a carbon sink but also as a control mechanism for atmospheric oxygen. To find and understand the driving factors behind it is a recent question in biogeochemistry. This paper discusses approaches and their influence from different research studies as oxygen exposure time, preservation by adsorption from organic matter to minerals and recalcitrant organic matter. Lakes were often ignored, due to their relatively small size but because of their high carbon burial rates they awake attention. The cited studies were almost all done in marine sediments and the results adapted to lake sites. C-burial in lakes can be compared best with deltaic sediment systems, because terrestrial organic matter, the connected river systems and terrestrial catchment area may plays a important role in the much higher C-burial rates of lakes. A key to understand OC burial processes in lakes could be to compare lakes showing very different conditions, such as highly oligotrophic and highly eutrophic, little or much mineral input, dominance of TOM or phytoplankton derived matter. The different approaches presented in this paper are linked together and are not exclusive to each other. During OC burial various diverse processes could overlay each other and for this, empirical relationships are very hard to prove for all sites