[crimsonalucard]

https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/ama...

it's just less accessible but I'm pretty sure like any forest on the face of the earth, portions of dead animal and plant matter is getting sequestered into the ground while another portion is getting exhaled by animals eating the leaves or other animals eating the animals.

The stuff that's getting sequestered though is probably miniscule. At the timescale of our lifetime it may be negligible but I wouldn't know as I'm not an expert. Perhaps someone with the actual data can fill us in?

[shkkmo]

Well, just based on the linked article:

> A final point to make is that the atmosphere is awash with oxygen, at 20.95% or 209,500 ppm (parts per million). Carbon dioxide, by comparison, is around 405 ppm and rising by around 2-3 ppm per year, over 500 times less. Human activity (around 90% of which being fossil fuel combustion) has caused this concentration to drop by around 0.005% since 1990, a trivial amount. In parallel, the same activities have caused carbon dioxide concentrations to rise by by 37 ppm since 1990, or 10%. This is a much more substantial percentage because there is so little carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to begin with, so human activities can make a major difference. This is why we need to worry about the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (and its resulting impact on climate), and why we don't need to worry about running out of oxygen.

The 3 order of magnitude difference is the relevant bit of info.

So while it takes millions of years for the amazon to have an impact on )2 levels, impacts on CO2 levels happen on the time scale of thousands of years.

This is also why it makes more sense to be concerned about the CO2 being released by burning the Amazon than the oxygen consumed by the fire.

[DenisM]

Even if a tiny amount was sequestered each year over the course of 55 million years there would be a huge pile of carbon there. But it isn’t there, is it?

[OscarCunningham]

Has the soil under the rainforest been slowly getting deeper?

[abdullahkhalids]

There is. That's all the coal, oil and gas we burn.

[crimsonalucard]

my initial reply was a post about oil mining in the amazon...

Additionally tectonic plates move, 55 million years ago the amazon probably wasn't even there. Additionally oil found on land could've been produced by biomass under the ocean and vice versa it's all moving around all the time. Likely the oil found underneath the amazon could have been produced at a time where that tectonic plate was under water.