CO(2) flux emissions from the Earth’s most actively degassing volcanoes, 2005–2015

The global carbon dioxide (CO(2)) flux from subaerial volcanoes remains poorly quantified, limiting our understanding of the deep carbon cycle during geologic time and in modern Earth. Past attempts to extrapolate the global volcanic CO(2) flux have been biased by observations being available for a relatively small number of accessible volcanoes. Here, we propose that the strong, but yet unmeasured, CO(2) emissions from several remote degassing volcanoes worldwide can be predicted using regional/global relationships between the CO(2)/S(T) ratio of volcanic gases and whole-rock trace element compositions (e.g., Ba/La). From these globally linked gas/rock compositions, we predict the CO(2)/S(T) gas ratio of 34 top-degassing remote volcanoes with no available gas measurements. By scaling to volcanic SO(2) fluxes from a global catalogue, we estimate a cumulative “unmeasured” CO(2) output of 11.4 ± 1.1 Mt/yr (or 0.26 ± 0.02·10(12) mol/yr). In combination with the measured CO(2) output of 27.4 ± 3.6 Mt/yr (or 0.62 ± 0.08·10(12) mol/yr), our results constrain the time-averaged (2005–2015) cumulative CO(2) flux from the Earth’s 91 most actively degassing subaerial volcanoes at 38.7 ± 2.9 Mt/yr (or 0.88 ± 0.06·10(12) mol/yr).