According to a recent MIT report, the biological pump is currently depicted in climate models with considerable uncertainty.

The "gold standard" calculation used to measure the pump's power has a greater margin of uncertainty than previously assumed, and estimates of how much atmospheric pollution the ocean would pump down to varying depths could be off by 10 to 15 parts per million, according to the researchers.

Phytoplankton, microscopic organisms that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they rise, are the start of the marine processes that lead to the ocean's biological pump. Phytoplankton collectively falls into the water column as "marine snow" when they die, taking carbon.

Microbes absorb the particles at different depths, converting the organic carbon and respiring it back into the deep ocean in an inorganic, mineral form, a mechanism known as remineralization.

Remineralizeng Carbon

Researchers collected underwater snow in the tropical Pacific in the 1980s at various places and depths. They developed a basic power law mathematical relationship - the Martin curve, after team member John Martin - to explain the intensity of the biological pump and how much carbon the ocean would remineralize and sequester at different depths based on these observations.

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