A new study to be published in the journal Nature shows that the ocean's ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is 20% greater than previously thought, up to 15 gigatons per year. The study focused on the role of plankton in transporting carbon to the seafloor.

The study found that the ocean stores 20% more carbon dioxide than previously estimated, primarily by transporting the carbon to the seafloor via plankton. However, this new understanding will not have a major impact on the current CO2 emissions crisis.

The ocean's ability to store atmospheric carbon dioxide is about 20% higher than estimated in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. [1] This is the result of a study published in the journal "Nature" on December 6, 2023.

Plankton eat carbon dioxide and convert it into organic tissue through photosynthesis as they grow. When plankton dies, some of it turns into particles called "marine snow." Being denser than seawater, these particles sink to the seafloor, storing carbon there and providing essential nutrients to a variety of deep-sea organisms, from tiny bacteria to deep-sea fish.

Global distribution of organic carbon fluxes in the high seas surface. Image source: Wang et al., 2023, Nature.

By analyzing data collected by oceanographic vessels from around the world since the 1970s, the team of seven scientists was able to digitally map organic matter fluxes throughout the world's oceans. The resulting new estimate of carbon storage capacity is 15 gigatons per year, an increase of about 20% compared to the previous study value published by the IPCC in its 2021 report (11 gigatons per year).

This reassessment of the ocean's storage capacity marks a major advance in our understanding of carbon exchanges between the atmosphere and ocean on a global scale. The team emphasizes that this absorption process takes tens of thousands of years and is therefore insufficient to offset the exponential growth in carbon dioxide emissions from global industrial activity since 1750, but the study highlights the important role of marine ecosystems in regulating global climate in the long term.

Reference "Biological carbon pump estimation based on multi-chron hydrological data", author: Wei-Lei Wang, Weiwei Fu, Frédéric A.C. LeMoigne, Robert T. Letscher, Yi Liu, Jin-Ming Tang and François W. Primeau, December 6, 2023, "Nature".

DOI:10.1038/s41586-023-06772-4

Compiled source: ScitechDaily