Huge well of molten carbon which ‘could spell disaster for climate’ is found beneath America

A vast well of molten carbon which could cause catastrophic warming if it was ever released – the equivalent of burning trillions of barrels of oil – has been found beneath America.

But don’t panic: the ‘deep-Earth’ reservoir of carbon-based minerals lies 217 miles beneath the surface.

It doesn’t pose an immediate threat, as it’s been there for up to a billion years, scientists believe.

The layer is up to 700,000 square miles, and lies ‘below the Cascade Ranges, the Rocky Mountains and Yellowstone caldera, and the topographic lows of the Snake River plain and Columbia plateau’, the researchers write.

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It was detected using seismic equipment by researchers at Royal Holloway University- and could change our understanding of how much carbon the Earth contains.

Releasing just one percent of the carbon in the reservoir would be equivalent to burning 2.3 trillion barrels of oil, Mail Online reports.

Dr Sash Hier-Majumder of the University of London said, ‘The residence time of this carbon in the mantle is relatively large (nearly 1 billion years), so this reserve is not an imminent threat.’

‘But one important mechanism by which carbon, sinking into the mantle via a subducting oceanic plate, can make it’s way back to the surface is by arc volcanism.’

‘Arc volcanism returns between 30-40% of the total subducted carbon back into the atmosphere.’