Written by: Micah Wiesner, Lachlan Wright, Shaidu Nuru Shaban

Natural release of CO₂ from earths interior can be associated with volcanic degassing, or fault related sources. This natural release is hard to quantify due to large geographic variance and the lack of studies focusing on fault related release.

The East African Rift System, an 8 million year old continental rift system which stretches from Afar in the North to Mozambique in the South of Africa, provides a natural laboratory to study the release of CO₂ from faults and volcanoes in close proximity. Calculations from this setting can be extrapolated to better constrain the global natural release of CO₂ from the earth to the atmosphere.

James Muirhead, a Research Associate within the Department of Earth Science of Syracuse University has helped to address this question in a recent paper Massive and Prolonged Deep Carbon Emissions Associated with Continental Rifting published in the journal Nature (2016). By measuring the CO₂ released across faults in the rift, Muirhead and other researchers were able to constrain the flux through time, and the source region of the CO₂ within the earth. By comparing this to the CO₂ released from the burning of fossil fuels, they were able to show that fossil fuels release approximately 500 times more CO₂ than processes associated with rifting.