For instance, one possibility is that if farmers and water managers know the role that inland deserts play in storing carbon, maybe they can alter how much carbon enters the underground reserves, said Michael Allen, a soil ecologist from the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of California-Riverside who was not an author on the new study, in the release.

Scientists had long suspected that a vast amount of melt water from nearby mountains had slipped beneath the basin, but the exact amount of water remained unknown.

The scientists tracked the carbon with a close study of the Tarim Basin, a Venezuela-sized valley in China’s Xinjiang region.

This qualifies the Tarim basin as what experts call a carbon sink zone, where carbon dioxide is absorbed from the atmosphere in significant amounts.

Flickr/dbraatenAn example of a common carbon sink zone in a rain forest of Jamaica.So how did this desert come to be such an active carbon dioxide sucker?

Knowing the locations of carbon sinks could improve models used to predict future climate change and enhance calculations of the Earth’s carbon budget, or the amount of fossil fuels humans can burn without causing major changes in the Earth’s temperature, researchers said.

Around 10 years ago, Li’s team discovered large amounts of carbon dioxide disappear in Tarim without explanation.

The team will now work with other research scientists to see if other underground “oceans” could potentially exist underneath other deserts.

“Our estimate is a conservative figure”. They estimate that as much as 10 times the amount in all of the great lakes could be down there, they told South China Morning Post.

“CCS [carbon capture and storage] is a 21st century idea, but our ancestors may have been doing it unconsciously for thousands of years”, he said. Li said the ocean under Tarim would can not be put into immediate use for Xinjiang’s economic development.

The water is not just salty, but contains a large amount of carbon dioxide. “If it is opened all the greenhouse gas will escape into the atmosphere”, he said.

Scientists have found that beneath deserts are massive hidden oceans, which could provide hope for fast eroding water resources on the surface. Now a team of researchers from China and the United States claims to have found the answer, and they say that all the generated carbon gets accumulated beneath the deserts.