Currently, people across the U.S. are working to recover from the storm damage from Hurricane Ida and to survive through an extremely dangerous fire season that is bringing fires to previously safe locations like Lake Tahoe. These natural disasters are driven, in part, by climate change, which in turn is driven by the release of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. While our planet has seen its fair share of ice ages and hot periods, the rate of change we’re seeing now is something that leaves scientists grasping at data to find hope for the future.

In a new study appearing in Nature Geoscience, researchers led by Thomas Gernon look at the full story on how volcanic eruptions affect our atmosphere. 

It’s fairly well understood that the particulate matter launched by volcanoes can reflect away sunlight and effectively cool the planet for a period of time. At the same time, the volcanoes pump out massive amounts of carbon dioxide that can warm the world, but the carbon-rich lava rock can both dissolve carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere and aid in the sequestration of carbon-rich minerals in the rivers and oceans the rocks wash into. Bottom line, it looks like volcanoes are generally our friends – cooling the Earth for short periods and sequestering away carbon dioxide over long periods. The question is are the long periods short enough to help us out as they have helped out a warmed Earth in the past?

This new research models all the combined volcanic processes over a 400 million-year period of Earth’s history. According to Gernon: Today, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are higher than at any time in the past three million years, and human-driven emissions are about 150 times larger than volcanic carbon dioxide emissions.

In looking at the chains of volcanoes around the world and the arcs of volcanic mountains they have created, the team worked out how much carbon can be sequestered over time through the weathering of this rock. The results aren’t good. Gernon goes on to say: The continental arcs that appear to have saved the planet in the deep past are simply not present at the scale needed to help counteract present-day carbon dioxide emissions.

While volcanoes and their related mountain ranges can’t reverse what we’ve done to Earth’s atmosphere, they can offer us solutions to try. Gernon points out that: Our assessment of weathering feedbacks over long timescales may help in designing and evaluating large-scale enhanced weathering schemes, which is just one of the steps needed to counteract global climate change.

Folks, we are alive to see our world rapidly changing. This is scientifically and intellectually fascinating, but as a human who wants to see the next generation thrive, we need to get our act together and start locking away our greenhouse gases so our children can have better futures.

More Information

University of Leeds press release

“Global chemical weathering dominated by continental arcs since the mid-Palaeozoic,” Thomas M. Gernon et al., 2021 August 23, Nature Geoscience