Yellowstone Supervolcano and the larger Western US region have been concealing a giant lump of liquidized, carbon-rich material about hundreds of kilometers.
It is 1.8 million square kilometers (approximately 700,000 square miles) in size and boiling in the earth's mantle, according to IFLScience.
As its name suggests, this is basically molten carbonates - a rock that contains a great deal of carbon.
Considering the magnitude of this carbon reservoir, conventional wisdom about the carbon cycle has had to be revised.
Yellowstone National Park, United StatesAidan B on Unsplash
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In 2011, around 10 billion tonnes of carbon were emitted into the atmosphere, primarily due to human activities. Based on the size of this reservoir, it is estimated that the upper mantle holds 10,000 times more carbon than this, mostly as trapped carbon dioxide gas.
Sash Hier-Majumder, a senior professor in geophysics at Royal Holloway, said in a statement, "Releasing only 1% of this CO2 into the atmosphere will be the equivalent of burning 2.3 trillion barrels of oil."
In comparison to yearly US oil use, it is a staggering 325 times more, based on the report.
Even though this carbon will gradually reach the surface through volcanic eruptions, people need not be concerned in the slightest.
It will have a negligible impact on the current pace of climate change, which a recent study determined to be 170 times faster than what would be predicted if mankind were removed from the equation.
Researchers from London's Royal Holloway university describe how they detected the carbonate monster under our feet using a vast network of seismic sensors in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
As a result of the variable velocities and angles at which seismic waves travel through various speeds, their effects might be very diverse.
This amazing finding was made possible by the newly installed, large sensor network and implied that scientists might utilize such waves to learn more about the composition of the planet's interior.
Hier-Majumder elaborated that under the western US lies a large subsurface partially-molten deposit of liquid carbonate. "It is a result of one of the tectonic plates of the Pacific Ocean forced underneath the western USA, undergoing partial melting thanks to gasses like CO2 and H2O contained in the minerals dissolved in it."
When one tectonic plate is pushed under another in a process known as subduction, a highly complicated, layered kind of melting occurs in the region above the descending plate as it dehydrates.
Large quantities of thick, gassy magma are finally produced, resulting in some of the most explosive volcanoes.
Subduction-zone volcanism is best shown by the whole Cascade Arc, of which Mount St. Helens is a part and by the volcano itself. In this instance, though, a lot of carbon-rich rocks were transported to the upper mantle, a sort of melt that only appears rarely.
When carbon-rich magma reaches the eruption phase, it often yields extremely fluid, very "cold," black-and-white carbonatite lava. Many volcanoes along the East African Rift see this kind of eruptive activity, producing landscapes that appear like something out of another world.
