The contribution of chemical weathering on atmospheric CO2 concentration. Perspectives in a context of climate change.

Climate change has important impacts on the intensity and frequency of floods and landslides in many regions of the world. At the same time, it is well known that the Carbon concentration in the atmosphere influences the climate. Knowing the natural phenomena of production / migration of carbon among oceans, atmosphere, ecosystems, and geosphere allows us to better understand the impacts of anthropogenic emissions, responsible of the recent climate change, that overlap with natural contributions. The chemical weathering, that consume atmospheric CO2 increasing river dissolved load, represents an important sink of atmospheric CO2. Starting from the knowledge of the chemical compositions and flow rates of river waters, as well as of the lithologies of their basins, it is possible to estimate the atmospheric CO2 consumed by chemical weathering. Since the 1990s, several studies quantified the atmospheric CO2 consumed by chemical weathering in different river basins around the world. In more recent times, several authors studied how the annual and inter-annual variations of river flowrates and air temperature influence the weathering processes and the correlated atmospheric CO2 consumption, highlighting how these influences are not-negligible in a context of climate change. In this work we show the contribution of CNR-IRPI on the study of weathering processes at basin scale and its correlated atmospheric CO2 consumption. In particular, we focused (i) on the studies performed in the Alpine region where the seasonal variations are weakly investigated and (ii) on the ongoing studies in the Apennine chain where the seasonal variations are more deeply investigated.