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. 2018 Feb 8;9:585. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-02922-9

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — Hypothesized mechanism underlying the stimulation of respiration by mixing of groundwater with river water: low concentration of DOC protects thermodynamically favorable C (represented as monomeric C) by imposing an energetic limitation in terms of low total energy across the DOC pool, allowing favorable DOC to accumulate in GW. The thermodynamically unfavorable state of DOC (represented as polymeric C) in RW protects it from microbial oxidation, allowing it to accumulate in RW despite the DOC of RW being at a higher concentration. GW–RW mixing increases DOC concentration, relative to GW (removing the energetic protection), and improves DOC thermodynamic favorability (removing thermodynamic protection). Simultaneously removing these protection mechanisms stimulates aerobic respiration (DOC to CO₂)