Hidden Massive Ocean Beneath Largest Chinese Desert Found

The team believes that the aquifers under the deserts might actually be holding more carbon than all the plants on the Earth together.

About 40 % of carbon dioxide generated by people remains inside of the environment and aproximately 30 percentage walks the pacific, in accordance with the People University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

According to commentators, the biggest question now was whether similar “oceans” could also exist under other large deserts, such as Sahara.

Earlier it was known that oceans and plants store carbon dioxide emitted by human activities.

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, in a a process that accelerated when farming started in the region 2,000 years ago.

‘Terrifying amount of water’, that is how the find has been described by Professor Li Yan, who headed the study at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital.

For decades of years, global scientists have been looking for the “missing carbon sink”, as some carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuel is absorbed in the atmosphere, some in the ocean, and some simply goes “missing”.

The latest study suggests that some of this carbon may be disappearing underneath the world’s deserts, a process exacerbated by irrigation.

A basin is, by definition, a valley that collects water from drainage systems, like water that has melted and is running down the face of nearby, snow-capped mountains. Most carbon sink zones are densely populated with plants that absorb carbon dioxide from the air and produce oxygen. (For comparison, 500 billion pounds is about 0.0005% of the amount of carbon dioxide stored in Earth’s oceans.). Some of this carbon is released into the soil through the plant’s roots.

Li and his team have collected underground water samples from 200 locations in the desert and by comparing the carbon dioxide concentration in the samples with the amount of carbon dioxide in the melt water thus calculating the amount of water which has flown into the basin.

Based on the various rates that carbon entered the desert throughout history, the study’s authors estimate 20 billion metric tonnes of carbon is stored underneath the Tarim Basin desert, dissolved in an aquifer that contains roughly 10 times the amount of water held in the North American Great Lakes.