HONG KONG: The study gathers millions of readings from the field to provide a clearer picture of the way the Southern Ocean captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, providing a buffer against climate change.
This ocean, also referred to as the Southern Ocean, accounts for nearly half of the carbon dioxide absorbed by the world’s oceans, making it essential to mitigating the worst results of local weather change.
Solving those types of puzzles would put an estimate on the response of the ocean to continued problems with global warming on firmer footing, said scientists.
Based off these findings, its revival began in 2002 and by 2010 it had reached the optimum level of carbon intake that should be expected on the basis of atmospheric CO2 increases alone. “And importantly, they remove a large part of the Carbon dioxide that is put into the atmosphere by human activities such as burning fossil fuels”, co-author Dorothee Bakker, of the University of East Anglia, said in a statement announcing the findings.
He said it was unclear how long the higher rate of absorption by the Southern Ocean, the strongest ocean region for soaking up carbon, would last. Even though the carbon sink by the ocean is still going strong we should not relax as there is no guarantee that it will keep absorbing the carbon in similar fashion in the future.
At the moment, there is also an ongoing debate about how the acidity of the water – with its increased carbon dioxide levels – may negatively affect sea creatures in the ocean. These deeper waters contain higher concentrations of dissolved CO2, so when they rise, they released this gas into the atmosphere, causing a decrease in the ocean’s net carbon uptake. This is demonstrated by an worldwide research team led by Nicolas Gruber, a professor of environmental physics at ETH Zurich, and his postdoc Peter Landschützer in a study recently published in Science.
Concerns about the ocean’s slow down of acting as a sponge for Carbon dioxide first emerged more than 8 years ago after a group of scientists reported the Southern Ocean uptake eased between 1981 and 2004.
The study reveals opposite results to previous assumptions that carbon sink in the Southern Ocean has been working slowly in the 21st century. Hence, long-term datasets are the only reliable means for determining the future evolution of the ocean’s sink for carbon.
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