Earth Sciences

On March 4th 2013, the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) launched their new landmark book “Carbon in Earth” at the US National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC.

The book outlines the questions guiding the DCO programme through 2019 and beyond. Robert Hazen, Carnegie Institution of Washington, co-edited the book with Adrian Jones of UCL and John Baross of the Seattle-based University of Washington. Ninety percent or more of Earth’s carbon is thought to be locked away or in motion deep underground – a hidden dimension of the planet as poorly unassessed as it is important to life on the surface.

The book assesses carbon in all major realms of the inner Earth, the variety of carbon reservoirs in minerals, melts and fluids, from the core to the crust and how these may have varied through time since formation of the Earth in the solar system. Ahead is an exciting journey of discovery about carbon in the Earth, where much is surprisingly poorly known. In order to discover the quantity, movements, and flux of Earth’s deep carbon it will be necessary; to probe the secrets of volcanoes and diamonds; to identify sources of deep hydrocarbons, and to explore entirely new forms of life discovered in the deep biosphere. The colour book presents abundant diagrams, animations, movies and carbon data as a springboard for the DCO. The book is available in hard copy, or free of charge for electronic download. It is volume 75 in the highly regarded series of Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry published jointly by the American Mineralogical Society and the Geochemical Society and will be an important carbon reference for teaching and research.

The DCO is transforming the way we look at Earth’s carbon, through enabling new instruments, new networks to sense fluxes of carbon-containing gases and fluids between the depths and the surface; open-access databases about deep carbon; educating deep carbon researchers in geology, physics, chemistry, and biology; probing deep natural energy systems; and encouraging the public to become more engaged with deep carbon science.

The entire, full-text contents of this volume are free.