Do You Know That We Produce 100 Times More Carbon Dioxide Than All the Volcanos on Earth?
By: Harish Maddukuri
Tags: Nature, Climate Change, Science, Global Warming, Carbon Emissions

According to new research, human activities are responsible for more than 37 Gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year which is around 100 times higher than that produced by all the volcanoes on our planet.

Human activities produce up to 100 times more carbon emissions than all the volcanoes on our planet. A new study by the Deep Carbon Observatory, composed of an international team of 500 researchers, has reported this in the pages of the journal Elements. The study describes how carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas responsible for global warming, is stored, emitted, and reabsorbed by both natural and man-made processes.

What else does this study say…?

In the study, which lasted about ten years, researchers found that carbon dioxide emissions produced by anthropogenic activities significantly exceed those coming from volcanoes, considered one of the main contributors to climate change. Their results, in fact, showed that only two-tenths of one percent of the Earth’s total carbon, about 43,500 Gigatonnes, is found above the surface of the oceans, land, and our atmosphere. While the rest — 1.85 billion gigatonnes — is stored in the crust, mantle, and core of our planet in its solid-state.

Image from deepcarbon.net

Researchers examined some of the most important carbon isotopes found in rock samples from around the world, which provided a key piece of data for understanding how the Earth was formed billions of years ago. With this data, they were able to create a timeline going back 500 million years to map the way carbon moves between crust, sea, and air. And they found that our planet has regulated atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, barring catastrophic events like volcanic eruptions or the meteorite that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

For example, the 66-million-year-old meteorite impact that created the Chicxulub crater and exterminated three-quarters of life on Earth released between 425 and 1,400 gigatonnes of Co2.

Image from HuffPost

Marie Edmonds from the University of Cambridge explained, “We’ve seen in the past that these large carbon inputs to the atmosphere cause global warming and huge changes in both ocean composition and oxygen availability.”

The researchers also estimated that carbon dioxide emissions from anthropogenic activities in a single year in 2018 exceeded about 37 gigatonnes.

“The amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere by anthropogenic activity over the past 10–12 years is equivalent to the catastrophic change during these events that we have seen in our planet’s past,” Edmonds explained to AFP (Agence France-Presse), an international news agency headquartered in Paris, France. Whereas, the CO2 released each year by volcanoes is around 0.3 and 0.4 gigatonnes, about 100 times less than man-made emissions. “Climate change deniers believe that volcanoes are the possible culprits of the highest Co2 emissions, but this is not the case,” Edmonds said.

Conclusion

In fact, although the Earth’s atmosphere has experienced higher concentrations of carbon dioxide than today, it still took hundreds of thousands of years for large volcano eruptions to accumulate these levels.

In contrast, man-made carbon dioxide emissions have seen CO2 levels rise by two-thirds over a few centuries. “Climate deniers are always saying that the Earth is rebalancing,” concluded Celina Suarez, of the University of Arkansas. “Well, yes it has. It will rebalance itself, but not on a timescale that is of significance to humans”