With reference to the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) which of the following statements is/are correct ?
1. It is Global Research Programme to outreach role of carbon on earth.
2. It conducts field obse

Question

With reference to the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) which of the following statements is/are correct ?
1. It is Global Research Programme to outreach role of carbon on earth.
2. It conducts field observations of deep microbial ecosystem.
Select the correct answer using the codes given below :
Codes :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Both 1 and 2. The Deep Carbon Observatory was a ten-year international research programme, launched in August 2009 with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, whose stated purpose was to transform our understanding of carbon inside the Earth — how much there is, where it sits, how it moves and where it came from. That is exactly what statement 1 describes (the paper's English is clumsy — 'outreach' here stands for exploring and communicating carbon's role in the Earth), so statement 1 is correct. Statement 2 is correct too, and it is the part students most often doubt: the DCO was organised into four research communities — Deep Life, Reservoirs and Fluxes, Extreme Physics and Chemistry, and Deep Energy — and the Deep Life community did precisely field work on subsurface microbial ecosystems, sampling microbes from deep continental boreholes, deep mines and sub-seafloor sediments. Its headline result was that this 'deep biosphere' holds roughly 15 to 23 billion tonnes of carbon in living microbial matter, far below any sunlight. Both statements being correct, the answer is (c). The programme was topical for a December 2019 paper because its decadal run was closing in 2019-20 and its deep-life findings were being reported through 2018-19.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This rejects statement 2, but field observation of deep microbial ecosystems was one of the DCO's four core work-streams — its Deep Life community sampled microbes from boreholes, mines and sub-seafloor sediments and estimated the size of Earth's deep biosphere.  (b) This rejects statement 1, yet the DCO was by definition a global research programme on the role of carbon in the Earth — that is the whole meaning of its name and its ten-year mandate.  (d) Both statements are accurate descriptions of the DCO, so denying both cannot be right.

Concept: Almost all of Earth's carbon is not in the air, the oceans or living things on the surface — it is locked in rocks, sediments, the crust and the mantle. That deep reservoir is not inert: carbon moves down into the mantle at subduction zones and comes back up through volcanoes and vents, on timescales of millions of years. This 'slow' or deep carbon cycle sets the long-term background level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and a whole biosphere of microbes lives inside it, feeding on chemical energy rather than sunlight. The Deep Carbon Observatory was the coordinated international effort to measure that hidden system.

State PCS 2019 Q96 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q96 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer