Question

Recall that sedimentary rocks, living organisms, oceans, and soil are all carbon reservoirs. If the carbon in each of these reservoirs was instantly transformed into atmospheric CO2, which reservoir would contribute the MOST CO2 to the atmosphere?living organismssoiloceanssedimentary rocks

Answer 1

Answer:

oceans

Explanation:

• As oceans are regarded as the global carbon reservoirs they tend to have 38,000 Gigatonnes of carbon which when evaporated could instantly release 16 times the carbon that on the terrestrial biosphere that is all plants and animal and about 60 times as that of the pre-industrial atmosphere.

Answer 2

Answer:

soil

Explanation:

The biggest natural carbon storage, or carbon sink, is the soil. The other two major natural carbon sinks are the ocean waters and the living organisms (mainly the plants). The storage of carbon is basically a process through which the carbon is trapped and removed from the atmosphere on a longer period of time, thus it is not active in the carbon cycle temporarily. The storage of carbon happens through biological, chemical, and physical process, and the soil gets and traps the carbon through all of them. A problem occurs in the past couple of centuries because there is more and more soil that has been damaged or destroyed, thus lot of carbon has been released into the atmosphere, and the soil has lesser capacity for taking in new carbon in it.