Scientists have long been looking for about a billion ton of unaccounted carbon dioxide produced each year from the burning of fossil fossils.
About 11 billion tons of carbon are generated annually; over five billion of these remain in the atmosphere, another three billion is in the ocean and the rest seems to be sequestered in forests. About a billion tons of carbon though could not be accounted for.
Now, researchers appear to have found a possible repository for the missing carbon, and this is below the deserts of the world. A discovery made by Chinese scientists suggests that there could be a hidden ocean underneath China's dry regions.
Although the Tarim basin in northwestern Xinjiang, China is among the planet's driest places, it conceals beneath saltwater that could be about 10 times the amount of water present in all of North America's five Great Lakes.
"Never before have people dared to imagine so much water under the sand. Our definition of desert may have to change," said Li Yan from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
About a decade ago, Yan and colleagues discovered massive amounts of carbon dioxide that disappear in the region but they could not find an explanation on where this could be going.
In their study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on July 28, the researchers state that there could be massive amounts of water beneath the largest deserts on Earth, serving as carbon sinks.
The researchers said that the water found in the ocean under Tarim is salty and contains large amounts of carbon dioxide. They contend that these waters could hold more carbon compared with all the plants on land, estimating that these aquifers underneath deserts store 14 times more carbon per year than previously believed.
"We discovered a potentially large carbon sink in the most unlikely place on earth, irrigated saline/alkaline arid land," the researchers reported.
The team of scientists took samples from different saline aquifers in the Tarim Basin in 2011 and 2012. The ground water samples were obtained from snow glaicers, direct rainfall, irrigation channels, or rivers then the levels of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) were determined. The researchers found out that rainfall or snowglacier melt water were almost DIC free. The other samples were not DIC free but the levels were signicantly low compared to ground water.
