Non‐marine carbonate: wherefore art thou?

Although notoriously difficult to delineate from the wider family of carbonate rocks and sediments, non-marine carbonates represent an important subset, forming in a large variety of depositional settings such as lakes, rivers, hydrothermal vents, caves, soils and sites affected by alkaline pollution (Pentecost, 2005; Alonso Zarza & Tanner 2010; Capezzuoli et al., 2014; Della Porta, 2015) (Figure 1). Due to the erosive and dissolution effect of meteoric waters in terrestrial environments, such carbonates are generally characterised by low preservation potential and their geological record is likely discontinuous and highly altered. Nevertheless, non-marine carbonates represent a significant component of terrestrial sedimentary basins, providing useful proxies of palaeoenvironmental conditions and can offer a means of passive remediation of sites harmed by human industry, including sequestration and storage of carbon dioxide. Understanding the physico-chemical and microbially mediated processes involved in their precipitation helps to constrain biogeochemical cycles, investigate the geological past and plan for the future approaches to global changes.