Organic carbon burial rates in muddy temperate shelf sea sediments

Muddy continental shelf sediments act as important sinks for atmospheric CO2 by accumulating organic matter, a small fraction of which is buried and stored as organic carbon (OC) over long timescales. Quantifying long‐term OC burial in shelf sediments is critical for understanding their role in climate regulation; however, this remains difficult due to limited age‐resolved data and the challenges of determining sediment accumulation rates and temporal changes in OC content. To address this, we quantified age‐resolved OC storage over the past two centuries in the upper 50 cm of the Western Irish Sea Mud Belt (WISMB) by measuring depth‐resolved OC content and sediment accumulation rates. The OC content (0.15%–1.62%), OC storage (1.30–15.15gC cm.