Given that carbon is one of the most ubiquitous elements on Earth and plays a crucial role in the global carbon cycle, comprehending the fluxes of carbon among environmental compartments and identifying the factors influencing these fluxes is of fundamental importance. Moreover, the continuous emissions of CO2 and greenhouse gases accentuate the significance of soil, already recognized as one of the Earth's largest carbon reservoirs, as a promising resource to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the form of soil organic carbon. With the paradigm shift from the conventional classification of soil organic matter based on humic substances to the emerging framework of the soil continuum model, innovative techniques have been under development to analyse this organic matter.