Scientists and researchers all over the world are searching for the source of 1 billion tons of unaccounted carbon dioxide released every year from fossil fuel burning.
Every year, 11 billion tons of carbon are produced where 5 billion remains in the Earth's atmosphere and 3 billion is found in the oceans where the remaining are distributed among the planet's forests. To date, roughly 1 billion tons of carbon are still not yet accounted for.
However, researchers may have found a potential repository for all this missing carbon and surprisingly, they are found underneath the world's deserts. Chinese scientists are now suggesting that there is a hidden ocean underneath the dry regions across China.
In northwest Xinjiang, the Tarim basin is one of the world's driest places where saltwater is hidden underneath, that is estimated to contain 10 times of all the water found in North America's five Great Lakes.
According to Li Yan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it's truly unimaginable that there is a massive amount of water underneath all this sand. The definition of desert is about to change.
Some 10 years ago, Yan and his colleagues have detected large amounts of carbon dioxide that are disappearing across the region however, they cannot pinpoint as to where this carbon dioxide is disappearing to.
In this new study, researchers believe that there could be massive amounts of water located in the world's biggest deserts that are functioning as carbon sinks as well.
Researchers also determined that the water found in the Tarim is an ocean of salty water with massive amounts of carbon dioxide. The researchers also believe that this hidden water can hold enough carbon more than all the plants found on land with estimates of 14 times more carbon every year than what is previously believed in aquifers under deserts.
This is the most unlikely place on the planet to discover a massive carbon sink under irrigated saline and alkaline arid land, scientists say.
To date, the scientists took samples of water from 200 locations across this desert where they compared the carbon dioxide content in the samples to melt water that was used in agricultural irrigation in Xinjiang for more than one thousand years. Researchers also believe that the water under the basin could even be more than previous estimates.
This study is published in the journal, Geophysical Research Letters.