LONDON: Fiords from Alaska to Norway soak up potentially damaging carbon from the atmosphere, making the steep-sided inlets an overlooked natural ally in offsetting man-made climate change, a study showed.
Fiords cover only 0.1 percent of the world’s ocean surface but account for 11 per cent of the organic carbon in plants, soils and rocks that gets buried in marine sediments every year after being washed off the land by rivers, it said.
The cliff-sided inlets, carved out by glaciers in successive ice ages, rank “as one of the ocean’s major hotspots for organic carbon burial, based on mass of carbon buried per unit area,” a U.S.-led team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.
