- Environmental Context: Immobilisation of organic chemicals in soil organic matter can strongly influence their availability in the environment. We show that the presence of water clusters, called water molecule bridges, hampers the release of organic molecules from soil organic matter. Moreover, water molecule bridges are sensitive to changes in environmental conditions (e.g., temperature or moisture) which affect the release of organic molecules into the environment. Abstract: Water molecule bridges (WaMB) can stabilise the supramolecular structure of soil organic matter (SOM) by connecting individual SOM molecular units. WaMB are hypothesised to act as a desorption barrier and thus to physically immobilise molecules in SOM. To test this hypothesis, we prepared two sets of soil samples – aged samples with WaMB developed, and vacuumed samples, in which WaMB were disrupted. The samples were spiked with phenol and then stored under controlled humidity. The degree of phenol immobilisation in SOM was assessed by desorption kinetics of phenol into a gas phase. This was compared with the thermal stability (T*) of WaMB obtained by modulated differential scanning calorimetry (MDSC) and the results were related to computer modelling, which provided the stability and solvation energies of phenol-WaMB-SOM models. The desorption kinetics of phenol was best described by a first-order model with two time constants ranging between 1 and 10 h. In aged samples, the time constants correlated with T*, which showed that the desorption time increased with increasing WaMB stability. Molecular modelling proposed that phenol molecules are preferentially locked in nanovoids with polar OH groups pointed to WaMB in the most stable configurations. Both findings support the hypothesis that WaMB can act as a desorption barrier for phenol.
