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> the water on the surface is 20% carbon by mass

Sorry, can you explain what you mean by this? Are you using "water" figuratively for all liquid, as opposed to H2O?

We conventionally call the Earth's seas "water" despite the fact that they have a lot of dissolved CO2 and fish in them. Presumably Ceres's seas don't have anything like a fish but without microorganisms to scavenge they'll tend to have a lot of carbon containing compounds.

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