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TellUs: 99% Of Carbon Lies Beneath Our Feet

Billions more carbon beneath our feet compared to in the atmosphere

A shocking revelation struck scientists recently, after an intensive study, they discovered the vast amount of carbon lying beneath our feet - especially compared to how much is in our atmosphere.

Scientists involved within the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) project have spent the last 10 years assessing the "reservoirs and fluxes" of the chemical element, carbon. To put this in the rhetoric of us everyday folk, they worked out where carbon is held in the Earth, the form in which it takes and how it then moves through the complexity of the Earth’s system. The main aim of the project was so that findings would help understand the limits of life on our planet and in the forecasting of volcanic eruptions.

Volcanic Eruption (Source: Daily Express)
So how much carbon is there, in the whole Earth, beneath us and in the atmosphere - let me break it down for you! There are 1.85 billion, billion tonnes of carbon on Earth in total. More than 99% of it inhabits beneath our feet. That means 1% of Earth's total carbon - approximately 43,500 billion tonnes - is above the planet's surface. This means all the carbon in the oceans, on the land and in the atmosphere. Everything else is in the deep reservoir, with two-thirds of the total contained within the Earth’s core.

"This work really came out of the realisation that much of the carbon that we are concerned about for climate change is only a tiny fraction of our planet's carbon. More than 90% of it is actually in the interior of the Earth - in the crust, in the mantle and the core," said Prof Marie Edmonds from Cambridge University, UK. 

"Very little was known about its form, how much there was, and how mobile it is. And, obviously, this all has huge importance for both the climate of the Earth, but also the habitability of our surface environment," the DCO collaborator told BBC News.

Layers of the Earth (Source: Left Brain Craft Brain)
You may now be questioning how this was even studied? The study was a long process that involved monitoring gas emissions from major volcanoes and examining deep-sea muds subjected into the Earth’s interior at tectonic plate boundaries. With these findings and the use of lab experiments and models, the team was then able to simulate the probable stores and flows of carbon.

Now we are getting an idea of the Earth’s inner workings, but what does this tell us? This study revealed that the planet's carbon budget through the last billion years has been in a relatively steady state. Therefore the carbon that has been drawn down into the Earth's interior is roughly equal to what has been outgassed to the atmosphere through the likes of volcanoes, for the last billion years.

However throughout history there have been major, catastrophic events. These were typically the results of asteroid impacts or prolonged, large-scale volcanism that in turn released an extortionate amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This would lead to global warming, acidified oceans and ultimately mass extinctions. 

There is much debate as to whether we are in the process of one of these mass extinctions. Over the past 100 years anthropogenic carbon emissions, typically from burning fossil fuels, have been 40 to 100 times greater than our planet’s geologic carbon emissions.

"It's really revealing that the amount of carbon dioxide we're emitting in a short time period is very close to the magnitude of those previous catastrophic carbon events," said Dr Celina Suarez from the University of Arkansas, ”a lot of those ended in mass extinctions, so there are good reasons why there is discussion now that we might be in a sixth mass extinction.”

It’s all sounding like impending doom, although the study did show a glimmer of hope. The scientists wanted to gauge the amount of carbon emitted from volcanoes. They discovered that eruptions are very often followed by surges in gas discharge.
"Putting very high-resolution sensors on crater rims allowed us to see very short time-scale changes in CO2 flux," explained Prof Edmonds. "The flux increased dramatically in the days and weeks before eruptions. We think this holds great promise for forecasting in the future, when used in tandem with things like volcano seismicity, and how the ground is moving.”

The DCO has published its findings in several papers in the journal Elements if you’d like to read more.

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