Gigatonne
Revision as of 16:54, 12 August 2015 by J.williams (talk | contribs)
A gigatonne is the mass of all the land mammals in the world.[1]
A gigatonne is 1,000,000,000 tonnes, and is often used when discussing human carbon dioxide emissions. This is roughly the mass of all land mammals (other than humans) in the world as per the XKCD comic strip to the right.
1 gigatonne is also roughly 125 million elephants; enough elephants to stretch from the Earth to the moon. Which would be bad for the elephant at the bottom and it would take a lot of food to feed all those elephants.
Interactive Graph
The graph below shows how much carbon dioxide different regions emit, note that regions emit many gigatonnes of carbon dioxide every year. This incredible amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere is what is leading to climate change.