Stable isotopes of deep soil water retain long-term evaporation loss on China's loess plateau

Abstract Evaporation from the land surface enriches heavy isotope ratios (2H/1H and 18O/16O) in shallow soils, and downward water movement will carry the fractionation signal to deep soils. However, how to acquire the evaporation from water isotopes in deep soil remains untested. Here, we measured water stable isotope composition in the deep soils (2–10 m) across 20 sites on China's Loess Plateau. Our results show that the Line-conditioned excess (lc-excess) in deep soils of these sites was invariable with depth at each site, but ranged between −14.0‰ and − 4.1‰ among these sites, indicating differing degree of enrichment in heavy water isotopes between sites. Moreover, the mean lc-excess in deep soils water was significantly correlated to mean annual precipitation (R 2 = 0.57), potential evapotranspiration (R 2 = 0.25), and the Budyko dryness (R 2 = 0.68), indicating that deep soil water lc-excess reflects land surface climate conditions. Furthermore, the deep soils correspond to a timescale of approximately 100 years at one site and more than 27 years at the remaining sites. These results together indicate that stable isotopes of deep soil water retained long-term land surface evaporation effects. Further, by implementing the steady-state isotope mass balance model into the lc-excess framework, we derived a new method to estimate evaporation loss fraction (f). Our f estimates at these sites varied between 5% and 15%, which may represent the lower bound of the actual evaporation to precipitation ratio. Nevertheless, our work suggests that in these and the other similar regions, deep soil is a novel archive for long-term soil evaporation loss, and f may be estimated through a snapshot field campaign of stable isotope measurements.