Human emissions are 100 times more volcanic eruptions

Every year, human activity releases carbon, which causes the climate to warm up, 100 times more than when all the volcanoes on earth were active, a decade-long study published today. Tuesday said.

At the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), an international team of 500 people, has published a series of articles outlining how carbon is stored, emitted and reabsorbed by natural processes. and artificial.

They found that human-made carbon dioxide emissions far outweigh the emissions of volcanoes , where they emit gas, and are often considered the main driver of climate change for current warming rates. .

The findings, published in Elements Magazine, show that only two-tenths of 1% of Earth's total carbon, or about 43,500 billion tons of carbon, is on the surface of our oceans, inland, and in our atmosphere. . The rest is an astonishing number: 1.85 billion billion tons of carbon is stored in the shell and core of our planet. This gives scientists clues about the Earth's formation billions of years ago.

Human emissions of carbon dioxide far outweigh the volcanic emissions.

It is known that one billion tons is equivalent to about 3 million Boeing 747s.

By measuring the prominence of certain carbon isotopes in rock samples around the world, DCO was able to create a 500 million-year timeline to map how carbon moves between land, at sea and in the air.

They discovered that the planet has been regulating the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas that causes global warming.

Occasionally, exceptions have caused "catastrophic disturbances" to the Earth's carbon cycle, such as massive volcanic eruptions or a meteorite attack that killed dinosaurs.

"Previously, we thought that these large amounts of carbon in the atmosphere caused warming, causing great changes in the composition of the ocean," said Professor Marie Edmonds, Department of Earth Sciences at Queen's College, Cambridge said.

The team estimates that the impact of the Chicxulub volcanic eruption 66 million years ago killed three-quarters of all life on Earth due to the release of 425 to 1,400 billion tons of CO2 from the ground. the earth surface.

Meanwhile, according to statistics, CO ₂ emissions from human impacts in 2018 were 37 billion tons, the highest ever.

"The amount of CO ₂ released into the atmosphere by human activity in the last 10-12 years is equivalent to the catastrophic changes in events we have seen in the past of the earth," Professor Edmonds said.

Associate Professor of Geology of Celina Suarez at the University of Arkansas, said the modern man-made emissions had "the same intensity" as carbon shocks in the past that caused mass extinctions.

"We are on the same level of carbon disaster ," Celina Suarez warned.

For comparison, the scientists calculated that the amount of CO2 released annually by volcanoes ranges between 0.3 and 0.4 billion tons, about 100 times less than human emissions.

"Skeptics always blame the volcano as a candidate for leading CO2 emissions, but that is not the case," said Professor Edmonds.

"Some people say that the Earth always balances itself," said Suarez. "Yes, it will rebalance itself, but not in a meaningful period for humans."