Humans perceive sudden and violent volcanic eruptions called paroxysms as major

Question

Humans perceive sudden and violent volcanic eruptions called paroxysms as major events on erath - think of how volcanoes are portrayed in movies or on television. Volcanoes do emit carbon-based gases into the atmosphere. One famous sruption of 20th century was Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, as island country in the western Pacific Ocean. How much carbon did Mount Pinatube emit into the atmosphere, in its 1991 eruption? in comparison to the size of the carbon flows and carbon reservoirs, is this a lot or a little? Why or Why not?

In your answer, be sure to address the following points, in addition to answering the questions: the numbers in the above link are in Gt of CO2 per year, so the weight includes oxygen molecules. While an atom of carbon has a weight of 12 Daltons, a molecule of CO2 weighs 44 Daltons (12 Daltons for the carbon atom, and 16 Daltons froneach of the two Oxygen atoms, for a total of 32 Daltons of oxygen). This, 44 pounds of CO2 contains as much carbon as does 12 pounds of pure carbon.

To help answering these questions, visit http://www.agu.org/pubs/pdf/2011EO240001.pdf, and read the short section "Paroxysmal Volcanic CO2 Emissions" on page 2.

Explanation / Answer

The climactic eruption of Mount Pinatubo on June 15, 1991, was one of the largest eruptions of the twentieth century and injected a 20-million ton (metric scale) sulfur dioxide cloud into the stratosphere at an altitude of more than 20 miles. The Pinatubo cloud was the largest sulfur dioxide cloud ever observed in the stratosphere since the beginning of such observations by satellites in 1978.

The published estimates of the global CO2 emission rate for all degassing subaerial (on land) and submarine volcanoes lie in a range from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year (Gerlach, 1991; Varekamp et al., 1992; Allard, 1992; Sano and Williams, 1996; Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998). The preferred global estimates of the authors of these studies range from about 0.15 to 0.26 gigaton per year. The 35-gigaton projected anthropogenic CO2 emission for 2010 is about 80 to 270 times larger than the respective maximum and minimum annual global volcanic CO2 emission estimates. It is 135 times larger than the highest preferred global volcanic CO2 estimate of 0.26 gigaton per year (Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998).

In recent times, about 70 volcanoes are normally active each year on the Earth

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