10Be erosion rates and riverine alkalinity concentration globally

The erosional influence on terrestrial alkalinity generation globally has been discussed over the last decades. In regional studies, long-term catchment-average denudation rates, determined from the concentration of the cosmogenic nuclide 10Be, have proven to be a powerful tool to quantify how physical erosion rates impact chemical weathering rates. Despite this, little research has been done relating 10Be-derived physical erosion rates with riverine alkalinity concentrations at a global scale. Our dataset aims to fill this gap by matching 10Be erosion rates with alkalinity measurements from 233 locations on six continents, covering latitudes from 44 °S to 51 °N. The locations of published 10Be erosion rates were extracted from the OCTOPUS database (doi:10.5194/essd-10-2123-2018) and either assigned alkalinity concentrations from published manuscripts, the GLORICH database (doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.902360), governmental agencies, or sampled ourselves. Our dataset comprises erosion rates spanning 4 orders of magnitude (2-9829 mm ka-1) and single and time-series measurements of alkalinity (1-3940 measurements per location) covering a large concentration range (4-4626 μmol L-1). We complemented the point sampling measurements of erosion rate and alkalinity concentration with the spatial description of runoff, lithology, temperature, precipitation, permanent snow and ice cover, forest cover, soil thickness and area affected by dams, of the respective catchment upstream from the erosion rate measurement location.