Significance: In coastal Alaska and the St. Elias orogen, over the past 1.2 million years, mass flux leaving the mountains due to glacial erosion exceeds the plate tectonic input. This finding underscores the power of climate in driving erosion rates, potential feedback mechanisms linking climate, erosion, and tectonics, and the complex nature of climate−tectonic coupling in transient responses toward longer-term dynamic equilibration of landscapes with ever-changing environments.

The giant 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake has been inferred to remobilise fine-grained, young surface sediment enriched in organic matter from the slope into the >7 km deep Japan Trench. Yet, this hypothesis and assessment of its significance for the carbon cycle has been hindered by limited data density and resolution in the hadal zone. Here we combine new high-resolution bathymetry data with sub-bottom profiler images and sediment cores taken during 2012–2016 in order to map for the first time the spatial extent of the earthquake-triggered event deposit along the hadal Japan Trench. We quantify a sediment volume of ~0.2 km³ deposited from spatially-widespread remobilisation of young surficial seafloor slope sediments triggered by the 2011 earthquake and its aftershock sequence. The mapped volume and organic carbon content in sediment cores encompassing the 2011 event reveals that this single tectonic event delivered >1 Tg of organic carbon to the hadal trench. This carbon supply is comparable to high carbon fluxes described for other Earth system processes, shedding new light on the impact of large earthquakes on long-term carbon cycling in the deep-sea.

Hadal trenches are the deepest places on Earth and are important foci for natural carbon sequestration. Much of the sedimentary sequences that accumulate within hadal trenches have been linked to widespread slope sediment remobilization events, triggered by subduction zone earthquakes. Therefore, hadal trench deposits may provide valuable insights into the hazards posed by large earthquakes and their implications for the carbon cycle. Despite this strong societal relevance, no studies to date have provided the necessary coverage to understand the spatial and temporal variations of earthquake-triggered deposition along a hadal trench axis. We address these issues by integrating high-resolution bathymetry and subbottom profiler data, and sediment cores acquired over the entire hadal trench axis of the Japan Trench. We identify around 40 isolated trench-fill basins along the trench axis of the Japan Trench that document 115 sediment remobilization event deposits. We map the spatio-temporal distribution of the acoustically transparent event deposit bodies imaged in subbottom profiler data from the trench-fill basins. Using radiocarbon dating, slope failure deposits identified from subbotom profiles and sediment coring were shown to be co-eval with major historic earthquake (e.g., AD2011 M_w9.0–9.1 Tohoku-oki, AD1454 M_w≥8.4 Kyotoku, and AD869 M_w≥8.6 Jogan events). Furthermore, the lower part of the acoustically imaged stratigraphic succession in isolated basins along the Japan Trench also documents several thick acoustically transparent bodies that relate to older events. These identifications of event deposits allow quantitative constraints of along-strike variation of sediment volumes redistributed by episodic events along the entire trench axis, revealing that the total volumes of event deposits triggered by different historic large earthquakes are highly variable. We conclude that at least 7 Tg (10¹² g) of organic carbon remobilized from surficial slope sediments is exported to the hadal axis of Japan Trench in the last 2,000 years by giant earthquakes. These findings highlight the significance of seismo-tectonic events for the long-term carbon cycle in hadal trenches and societal implications.