There's a giant, underground ocean hidden in the middle of this Chinese desert
By Jessica Orwig
2 hours ago
(Pravit on Wikipedia) Taklamakan desert in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
When we think about the deserts of the world, water abundance is one of the last things that come to mind. But that might change for the Taklamakan Desert in northwest China.
While studying the amount
of carbon dioxide in the desert's air, a team of researchers were
surprised to learn that large amounts of the greenhouse gas were
disappearing around a region of the desert called the Tarim basin.
The most likely explanation, they recently reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, is a massive underground ocean that has more water than all of the great lakes in North America combined.
"Never before have people dared
to imagine so much water under the sand," professor Li Yan — who led the
study at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Xinjiang Institute of Ecology
and Geography in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital — told the South China Morning Post, where we first learned about the study. "Our definition of desert may have to change."
A basin is, by definition, a valley that collects water from drainage
systems, like water that has melted and is running down the face of
nearby, snow-capped mountains. Two mountain ranges border the Tarim
basin: to the north are the Tian Shan mountains and to the south are the
Kunlun Mountains.But, if you look at the Tarim basin, you won't see any water:
(NASA Landsat) That's partly because locals collect most of the melt water to irrigate crops. The rest either seeps into the ground or evaporates into the dry desert air.
The team visited nearly
200 different locations across the desert to collect deep, underground
water samples. They then measured the amount of carbon dioxide in each
water sample, and discovered that it had high concentrations of carbon
dioxide — enough that suggested the ground was absorbing about 500
billion pounds of the greenhouse gas each year. (For comparison, 500
billion pounds is about 0.0005% of the amount of carbon dioxide stored in Earth's oceans.)
This qualifies the Tarim basin as what experts call a carbon sink
zone, where carbon dioxide is absorbed from the atmosphere in
significant amounts. Most carbon sink zones are densely populated with
plants that absorb carbon dioxide from the air and produce oxygen. Being
sparse of plants, deserts are not usually considered for this title.(Flickr/dbraaten) An example of a common carbon sink zone in a rain forest of Jamaica.
So how did this desert come to be such an active carbon dioxide sucker?
It dates back to 2,000
years ago when settlers in the region began irrigating the land, the
scientists suspect. And the soil of the local farmlands is salty, like
the ocean, which dissolves carbon dioxide from the air more readily than fresh water.
"As a result, agricultural development over human history has enhanced the carbon sink," they write in their report.
The team also used their carbon
dioxide measurements from underground water samples and compared it with
CO2 levels in the surface water to calculate how much water had seeped
into the basin over time and overall amount of water underground. They
estimate that as much as 10 times the amount in all of the great lakes
could be down there, they told South China Morning Post.
The scientists don't advise locals to go digging for it, though,
because it's extremely salty and highly carbonated from all of the
carbon dioxide it's been absorbing for the last two millennium.NOW WATCH: Why mosquitoes bite some people and not others
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