LONDON: The world’s deserts may be storing some of the climate-changing carbon dioxide emitted by human activities, according to a new study which found that massive aquifers underneath deserts could hold more carbon than all the plants on land. The study estimates that the world’s desert aquifers contain roughly 1 trillion metric tonnes of carbon – about a quarter more than the amount stored in living plants on land.
Humans add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere through fossil fuel combustion and deforestation. About 40 per cent of this carbon stays in the atmosphere and roughly 30 per cent enters the ocean. Scientists believed the remaining carbon was taken up by plants on land, but measurements show plants don’t absorb all of the leftover carbon. Scientists have been searching for a place on land where the additional carbon is being stored – the so-called “missing carbon sink.”
The new study suggests some of this carbon may be disappearing underneath the world’s deserts – a process exacerbated by irrigation. Scientists examining the flow of water through a Chinese desert found that carbon from the atmosphere is being absorbed by crops, released into the soil and transported underground in groundwater – a process that picked up when farming entered the region 2,000 years ago. Underground aquifers store the dissolved carbon deep below the desert where it can’t escape back to the atmosphere, researchers found. The new study estimates that because of agriculture roughly 14 times more carbon than previously thought could be entering these underground desert aquifers every year.
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