Thanks for thoughtful reply! Extracting and burning all that oil would have calculatable effect in terms of global warming - could work that out approximately but am currently hiking through the Pyrenees foothills!
Oh yes, for sure, the extracting and burning has a huge effect, because we are doing that at rates far faster than the original sequestration of the material in the ground back in the Miocene, or whenever oil and natural gas organic precursors were buried.
Great question that I'm not qualified to answer... but, I would speculate that the carbon sinks in the oceans (where limestone precipitates), forests (plants removing CO2), and perhaps soils (organic reactions) would volumetrically be much more significant than hydrocarbons (oil, natural gas, coal) as they are trapped. As large as the volumes are there in Azerbaijan, I suspect that it is not that huge in terms of global systems. Some of the even more voluminous times of formation of oil source rocks (when the organic material was sequestered), the Devonian, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, did not seem to have huge effect on the climate. There was a glacial period near the end of the Devonian, along with a global anoxic period in the world ocean, but I think the cooling is suspected to relate to the growth and explosive expansion of plants and forests for the first time, and that they (while alive) were the greatest agents of sequestration. But I definitely do not know for sure.
Thanks for thoughtful reply! Extracting and burning all that oil would have calculatable effect in terms of global warming - could work that out approximately but am currently hiking through the Pyrenees foothills!
Oh yes, for sure, the extracting and burning has a huge effect, because we are doing that at rates far faster than the original sequestration of the material in the ground back in the Miocene, or whenever oil and natural gas organic precursors were buried.
No idea oil was laid down so recently. Would sequestration of this much oil cause noticeable global cooling?
Great question that I'm not qualified to answer... but, I would speculate that the carbon sinks in the oceans (where limestone precipitates), forests (plants removing CO2), and perhaps soils (organic reactions) would volumetrically be much more significant than hydrocarbons (oil, natural gas, coal) as they are trapped. As large as the volumes are there in Azerbaijan, I suspect that it is not that huge in terms of global systems. Some of the even more voluminous times of formation of oil source rocks (when the organic material was sequestered), the Devonian, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, did not seem to have huge effect on the climate. There was a glacial period near the end of the Devonian, along with a global anoxic period in the world ocean, but I think the cooling is suspected to relate to the growth and explosive expansion of plants and forests for the first time, and that they (while alive) were the greatest agents of sequestration. But I definitely do not know for sure.