Even though it is widely recognized as one of the driest places on Earth, the Tarim basin in the northwestern Xinjiang province of China is home to a massive subterranean ocean which could have a significant impact on climate change.
According to Discovery News, this paradoxical part of the world is surrounded by mountains that block the passage of moist ocean air, causing it to receive less than four inches of rain each year. However, the Tarim basin is also home to a buried aquifer that contains 10 times the water found in all five of the Great Lakes combined. That’s a lot of water.
While this underground ocean is too salty for the residents of the arid region to use, the authors of a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters claim that it is acting as a large carbon sink, with its alkaline soil helping to dissolve CO2 in the water.
Other deserts could have their own subsurface aquifers
Lead investigator Professor Li Yan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, and his colleagues collected samples of the underground water from nearly 200 different locations, comparing the carbon dioxide content in those samples with snowmelt from the surrounding mountains.
“This is a terrifying amount of water. Never before have people dared to imagine so much water under the sand. Our definition of desert may have to change,” Yan told the South China Morning Post, adding that the discovery was made by accident, as they were searching for carbon, not water.
His team first noticed large amounts of carbon dioxide inexplicably disappearing in Tarim about 10 years ago, and their findings suggest that other large deserts could be home to large quantities of subsurface water. If so, this could make them carbon sinks that are as important as forests and oceans when it comes to staving off the ill effects of global climate change.
The residents of Xinjiang have used melt water for agricultural irrigation for thousands of years, and the alkaline soil is helping CO2 dissolve into the water. By dating the carbon’s age, Yan’s team “recorded a jump of ‘carbon sinking’ after the opening of the ancient Silk Road more than two thousand years ago. CCS [carbon capture and storage] is a 21st century idea, but our ancestors may have been doing it unconsciously for thousands of years.”
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Feature Image: NASA
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