What is the carbon cycle?
Q: What is the carbon cycle?
A: The carbon cycle is the way carbon is stored and replaced on Earth. It involves processes that take hundreds of millions of years, as well as those that happen annually.
Q: What are the main ways that carbon gets into the carbon cycle?
A: The main ways that carbon gets into the carbon cycle are volcanoes, and the burning of fossil fuels like coal and gas. In recent history, people burning fossil fuels have been adding about a hundred times more CO2 to the air than volcanoes.
Q: How does photosynthesis remove CO2 from the atmosphere?
A: Photosynthesis by living organisms removes CO2 from the atmosphere by taking it in for energy production. Some of this gets released when they die and decompose, but a proportion also gets buried in sedimentary rock.
Q: How does weathering help to dissolve rocks?
A: Weathering by rain washes out CO2 in the form of dilute carbonic acid which then reacts with rock, helping to dissolve and destroy it. This process also ends up as sediment which helps complete the cycle.
Q: Where else does some CO2 get dissolved?
A: Some CO2 also gets dissolved in oceans where it can stay for long periods before being released back into atmosphere or becoming part of sedimentary rock.
Q: How much more CO2 has been added to air by people compared to volcanoes?
A: For every ton of CO2 added to air by volcanoes, about 100 tons of CO2 have been added to air by people through combustion over last hundred years.
Q:What is a large consumer of atmospheric Carbon Dioxide essential for dissolving rocks ?
A: Weathering is a large consumer of atmospheric Carbon Dioxide essential for dissolving rocks .
