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Carbon monoxide vs carbon dioxide12/1/2023 ![]() Global, Regional, and National Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Referencesīoden, T.A., Marland, G., Andres, R.J. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora produced enough ash and aerosols to cancel summer in Europe and North America in 1816. Whether from small or large eruptions, volcanic aerosols reflect sunlight back into space, cooling global climate. Photo courtesy NASA JSC's Gateway to Astronaut Photography of the Earth. Encircling the globe at altitudes even higher than the tops of thunderstorm clouds, the particles reflected so much incoming sunlight that global surface temperatures cooled off for two years. Taken by astronauts from the Space Shuttle in early August 1991, this photo of the Earth's limb shows the double layer of volcanic aerosol particles (interpretation from Self et al., 1999) that spread through the stratosphere following the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Even small eruptions often produce volcanic ash and aerosol particles. ![]() That's because carbon dioxide isn't the only thing that volcanoes inject into the atmosphere. Today, rather than warming global climate, volcanic eruptions often have the opposite effect. Current volcanic activity doesn't occur on the same massive scale. This large-scale, long-lasting eruption likely raised global temperatures enough to cause one of the worst extinction events in our planet's history. Volcanic activity today may pale in comparison to the carbon dioxide emissions we are generating by burning fossil fuels for energy, but over the course of geologic time, volcanoes have occasionally contributed to global warming by producing significant amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.įor example, some geologists hypothesize that 250 million years ago, an extensive flood of lava poured continually from the ground in Siberia perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. Human emissions of carbon dioxide continue day after day, month after month, year after year. Helens (1980) and Pinatubo (1991) both released carbon dioxide on a scale similar to human output for about nine hours. For example, Gerlach estimated that the eruptions of Mount St. Occasionally, eruptions are powerful enough to release carbon dioxide at a rate that matches or even exceeds the global rate of human emissions for a few hours. Gerlach remarked via email, “Taken at face value, their result implies that anthropogenic CO 2 exceeds global volcanic CO 2 by at least a factor of 60 times.” While higher than Gerlach's estimate, the figure is still just a fraction of carbon dioxide output from human activities. ![]() While acknowledging a large range of variability in the estimates, the authors concluded that the best overall estimate was about 0.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. ![]() In 2013, another group of scientists-Michael Burton, Georgina Sawyer, and Domenico Granieri-published an updated estimate using more data on carbon dioxide emissions from subsurface magma that had become available in the years since the last global estimate. Geological Survey photo by Robert Krimmel. For about nine hours, carbon dioxide emissions from the volcano may have matched human emissions, but such massive eruptions are rare and fleeting. On May 18, 1980, Mount Saint Helens experienced an explosive eruption, sending a column of ash, steam, and gases up to 60,000 feet above sea level.
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