95% of all the carbon on Earth has already been calcified, for which there is no natural biological process capable of undoing it. When that reaches 100%, in about half a million years, all life on Earth will cease. And there's nothing we can do about it except emigrate and find another planet which still has free carbon.
Carbon It's constantly generated.
Carbon It's constantly generated.
Earth contains 1.85 billion billion tonnes of carbon, according to a 10-year research project. If it were all combined into a single sphere, it would be larger than many asteroids.
The new estimate comes from the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), a huge international research programme established in 2009. Its main goal has been to estimate the scale of the carbon cycle, “from where carbon gets released in volcanic eruptions and fractures, to where it goes into the atmosphere, gets filtered down into the biosphere and gets buried as sediment and rock”, says Celina Suarez at the University of Arkansas.
This has involved everything from measuring the release of carbon dioxide gas from volcanoes to studying diamonds (a solid form of carbon) from deep in the mantle. The observatory has also looked at carbon isotopes in rocks laid down at different times to understand how the carbon cycle has changed over time.
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...earths-carbon-and-99-per-cent-is-underground/