← 🌦️ Environment · usually met in Std 7-12
Carbon moving between air, living things, soil, rock and ocean. It is a closed loop until something digs up a store that was out of circulation.
Plants take carbon dioxide from the air and build it into sugars. Animals eat plants and release carbon dioxide by respiration. Decomposers return the rest. Oceans absorb and release carbon dioxide at the surface, and over much longer timescales carbon is locked into rock and sediment and released again by volcanoes.
Fossil fuels are carbon that left the cycle hundreds of millions of years ago, buried before it could decay. Burning them returns it to the atmosphere in a few centuries — fast, by the standards of a cycle that took geological time to build the store. That mismatch of timescales, rather than the existence of the cycle, is what the climate problem actually is.
Want to see it moving? Search YouTube for “The carbon cycle” ↗ — we send you to the search rather than to one video, because a link to one video eventually rots.
This entry was written for Star Student in our own words — it is a summary, not a source. Here is where the people who actually hold these facts keep them. Go and check.
Your own textbook ↗Balbharati publishes the textbooks free to read online. Your chapter is the thing to check first — an encyclopedia is a summary, and the syllabus is the syllabus. India Meteorological Department ↗The monsoon, rainfall and cyclone warnings, from the department that issues them. Zoological Survey of India ↗India's animal life, surveyed and catalogued since 1916.Last gone through: 1 October 2026 · How these entries are written
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