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Microbial life inhabiting subseafloor sediments plays an important role in Earth’s carbon cycle. However, the impact of geodynamic processes on the distributions and carbon-cycling activities of subseafloor life remains poorly constrained. We explore a submarine mud volcano of the Nankai accretionary complex by drilling down to 200 m below the summit. Stable isotopic compositions of water and carbon compounds, including clumped methane isotopologues, suggest that ~90% of methane is microbially produced at 16° to 30°C and 300 to 900 m below seafloor, corresponding to the basin bottom, where fluids in the accretionary prism are supplied via megasplay faults. Radiotracer experiments showed that relatively small microbial populations in deep mud volcano sediments (10 2 to 10 3 cells cm −3 ) include highly active hydrogenotrophic methanogens and acetogens. Our findings indicate that subduction-associated fluid migration has stimulated microbial activity in the mud reservoir and that mud volcanoes may contribute more substantially to the methane budget than previously estimated.
The regional patterns and timing of the Younger Dryas cooling in the North Atlantic realm were complex and are mechanistically incompletely understood. To enhance understanding of regional climate patterns, we present molecular biomarker records at subannual to annual resolution by mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) of sediments from the Lake Meerfelder Maar covering the Allerod-Younger Dryas transition. These analyses are supported by conventional extraction-based molecular-isotopic analyses, which both validate the imaging results and constrain the sources of the target compounds. The targeted fatty acid biomarkers serve as a gauge of the response of the local aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem to climate change. Based on the comparison of our data with existing data from Meerfelder Maar, we analyse the short-term environmental evolution in Western Europe during the studied time interval and confirm the previously reported delayed hydrological response to Greenland cooling. However, despite a detected delay of Western European environmental change of similar to 135 years, our biomarker data show statistically significant correlation with deuterium excess in Greenland ice core at - annual resolution during this time-transgressive cooling. This suggests a coherent atmospheric forcing across the North Atlantic realm during this transition. We propose that Western European cooling was postponed due to major reorganization of the westerlies that were intermittently forcing warmer and wetter air masses from lower latitudes to Western Europe and thus resulted in delayed cooling relative to Greenland.