Sentences with phrase «much ocean carbon»

Not exact matches

Having so much water might also slow or halt the movement of building blocks of life, such as carbon and phosphorus (the backbone of DNA), into oceans.

Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes the planet heat up; too much dissolved in the ocean makes the water more acidic.

«For example, [measuring] chlorophyll a will give you information about how much biological activity is going on, and eventually more information about the concentration of carbon dioxide within the ocean and the atmosphere,» said Yoshihisa Shirayama, executive director of research at the Japan Agency for Marine - Earth Science and Technology in Tokyo.

Faster winds are affecting how much heat and carbon dioxide the oceans soak up, with immense consequences for us all, finds Anil Ananthaswamy

A crucial reason why the study of freshwater acidification has lagged until now is because determining how atmospheric carbon affects these ecosystems requires complex modeling, and is much less clear than that occurring in oceans, according to study author Linda Weiss, an aquatic ecologist at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.

Much of the carbon dioxide given off from the burning of fossil fuels goes into the ocean, where it changes the acid balance of seawater.

That's because the carbon dioxide remains trapped in the atmosphere — much of it lingers a millennium later — pumping more and more energy into the ocean.

Until recently, people believed much of the rain forest's carbon floated down the Amazon River and ended up deep in the ocean.

Balmy ocean waters are putting the squeeze on phytoplankton, tiny plants that collectively fix as much carbon dioxide as all terrestrial greenery combined.

Faster winds are affecting how much heat and carbon dioxide the oceans soak up, with immense consequences for us all

By looking at the chemistry of rocks deposited during that time period, specifically coupled carbon and sulfur isotope data, a research team led by University of California, Riverside biogeochemists reports that oxygen - free and hydrogen sulfide - rich waters extended across roughly five percent of the global ocean during this major climatic perturbation — far more than the modern ocean's 0.1 percent but much less than previous estimates for this event.

They bury nearly half as much carbon as the oceans do.

The eruption in Iceland naturally fertilized the ocean but failed to prod plankton to suck up much more carbon dioxide

So much of this «black carbon» is entering the marine ecosystem that it could be hurting ocean life, although further tests will be needed to confirm this possibility.

But biogeochemist Kenneth Coale, director of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, estimates that the silicon - rich southern part of the Southern Ocean would deliver up to twice as much potential carbon sequestration as the northern area Smetacek fertilized, in large part because of the diatoms and associated ecosystem dynamics.

«The amount of carbon that you can sink into the Southern Ocean is much less than I expected.»

Professor Williams, Chair in Ocean Sciences at Liverpool, added: «This study is important by providing a narrower window of how much carbon we may emit before reaching 1.5 °C or 2 °C warming.

One of the researchers» previous studies found black carbon in the remote depths of the oceans surrounding Antarctica, and Dittmar suspects that much of the black carbon eventually winds up in deep ocean deposits around the globe.

Painting roofs white, he says, is a much different approach than spilling iron into the ocean to encourage plankton blooms (which soak up carbon dioxide).

But much of it takes place in oceans, which are susceptible to the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide human activity releases into the atmosphere.

And while carbon dioxide is crucial for plant life, the carbon balance on Earth is a delicate cycle, with oceans and land able to absorb only so much CO2.

Therefore, models have largely left mixotrophs out of the equation and have instead looked to other marine processes to try and explain how much carbon is stored in the oceans.

In his review of Robert Laughlin's book Powering the Future, Fred Pearce summarises the author's view as «ultimately the planet won't care much about our carbon dioxide emissions» because the gas will all end up in the oceans (1 October, p 46).

One of the many downsides of too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is what happens when some of that CO2 is absorbed by the oceans.

If carbon - containing fallout from the upper ocean falls fast enough, it bypasses diversions by other creatures and reaches depths where nothing much happens to it for a long time, says Sari Giering of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, England, where she studies oceanic carbon.

The researchers can assess how much carbon can be captured and stored in the deep oceans by studying the amount of carbon that gets recycled back to the surface.

We have no idea, for example, how much of the atmospheric carbon being absorbed by the surface of the oceans reaches the bottom, nor how long that takes.

As more carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere, the global ocean soaks up much of the excess, storing roughly 30 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions coming from human activities.

The list is long and familiar: too much carbon dioxide warming the atmosphere and acidifying the ocean; too much land being cleared, leading to deforestation and desertification; overfishing causing crashes in one stock after another; and habitat destruction reducing biodiversity so drastically that some consider a sixth mass extinction to be under way.

Understanding how carbon flows between land, air and water is key to predicting how much greenhouse gas emissions the earth, atmosphere and ocean can tolerate over a given time period to keep global warming and climate change at thresholds considered tolerable.

There is, therefore, much current interest in how coccolithophore calcification might be affected by climate change and ocean acidification, both of which occur as atmospheric carbon dioxide increases.

But because their roots and soil are regularly washed by tides, much of this organic carbon leaches into the ocean.

They were Jorge Sarmiento, an oceanographer at Princeton University who constructs ocean - circulation models that calculate how much atmospheric carbon dioxide eventually goes into the world's oceans; Eileen Claussen, executive director of the Pew Center for Global Climate Change in Washington, D.C.; and David Keith, a physicist with the University of Calgary in Alberta who designs technological solutions to the global warming problem.

«Much of the carbon cycling in the ocean happens unseen to the naked eye, and it involves a complex mix of processes involving microbes and molecules,» said Azam, a distinguished professor of marine microbiology.

Coastal portions of the world's oceans, once believed to be a source of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere, are now thought to absorb as much as two - thirds more carbon than they emitted in the preindustrial age, researchers estimate.

Thus, these «recycling» bacteria play an important role in regulating how much of the planet's carbon dioxide is stored in the oceans.

«Without the existence of these proteins that could help phytoplankton cope in these stressful environments, the phytoplankton diversity in many regions of the ocean would be much lower, in particular by reducing large phytoplankton such as diatoms that are known to take up a lot of carbon dioxide, thus possibly accelerating the pace of a warming planet,» said Marchetti, assistant professor of marine science at UNC - Chapel Hill.

At present, more than a third of the world's carbon is sucked up by the oceans — thank God, or else we'd have that much more warming already.

He and his colleagues turned to satellite data to observe the phenomenon on a much broader scope and found that iceberg - related blooms could contribute a fifth of the Southern Ocean's total carbon sequestration.

Almost everybody agrees that it has to do with fluctuations in the carbon uptake by the oceans, with a number of theories relying on enhancement of the biological pump, much along the lines you suggest.

Much of that carbon dioxide dissolved into the oceans» water.

The aim in general was to work out how much of the carbon dioxide resulting from the burning of fossil fuels was ending up in the oceans, vegetation, soils, weathered minerals and so on.

In turn, a warmer atmosphere heated the oceans making them much less efficient storehouses of carbon dioxide and reinforcing global warming, possibly forestalling the onset of a new glacial age.

It became understood that both plants and oceans had limits with respect to how much carbon dioxide they could take up over a fixed time.

The findings give scientists a better handle on the earth's carbon budget — how much carbon remains in the atmosphere as CO2, contributing to global warming, and how much gets stored in the land or ocean in other carbon - containing forms.

Those are probably still a couple decades away, but prototypes of conceptually much simpler six µm scale motors that could someday navigate the oceans to sequester carbon dioxide have been demonstrated.

Stopping land degradation is critical in mitigating climate change: soil is the second largest carbon sink after the ocean, but degraded land stores much less carbon.

Stukel and his colleagues examined one such front off the coast of Santa Barbara, California and set sediment traps to measure how much carbon was being transported to the deep ocean in these areas.

Those findings could be critical as scientists work to better understand climate change and how much carbon the Earth's atmosphere and oceans can store.

In the oceans, warmer weather is driving stronger winds that are exposing deeper layers of water, which are already saturated with carbon and not as able to absorb as much from the atmosphere.