Climate Change: Carbon Sink Discovered Beneath World’s Deserts

The discovery created new direction for finding the “missing carbon sink”, Li said. Now a team of researchers from China and the United States claims to have found the answer, and they say that all the generated carbon gets accumulated beneath the deserts. About 40% of this carbon stays in the atmosphere and roughly 30% enters the ocean. Although researchers thought the remainder was taken up by plants on land, new measurements reveal that plants don’t absorb all of the leftover carbon.

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.

Dr Yan Li and co-authors followed the journey of water through the Tarim Basin from the rivers at the edge of the valley to the desert aquifers under the basin.

For this study, scientists examined the flow of water through a Chinese desert. For instance, one possibility is that if farmers and water managers know the role that inland deserts play in storing carbon, maybe they can alter how much carbon enters the underground reserves, said Michael Allen, a soil ecologist from the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of California-Riverside who was not an author on the new study, in the release. The study suggests that the desert aquifers of the world contain approximately 1 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is a quarter more than what the living plants have stored.

Yan Li, scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Urumqi, Xinjiang and leader of the study, explained that the carbon dioxide is stored in these geological structures that are covered in thick layers of sand. They found that as water moved through irrigated fields, the water gathered dissolved carbon and moved it deep underground.

Although this process of carbon burial occurs naturally, the scientists estimate that the amount of carbon disappearing under the Tarim Desert each year is nearly 12 times higher because of agriculture. “It is basically a one-way trip”. This was the same process that picked up when farming entered the region 2,000 years ago, noted researchers.