Research Casts Doubt on Ocean's Carbon Capture Capacity

The oceanic carbon cycle has been seen as one of the other natural means that carbon can be managed from the atmosphere to prevent the harmful effects of global warming. More specifically, climate scientists are hoping that the ocean pump (a part of the cycle that stores carbon deep in the ocean depths for hundreds of years) can alleviate the burden of today's large-scale emissions.

Unfortunately, new research is suggesting that the calculations regarding the ocean pump may not be as accurate as many hoped.

Carbon capture under the sea

It is well-known that the global environment had a lot of its own natural carbon capture and control cycles that maintained the stability of Earth's climate. On land, there were forests but the ocean played a part as well. That is what the oceanic carbon cycle was for.

Just like how trees in a forest create a carbon sink, phytoplankton in the ocean floor absorb their own share of carbon from the ocean's surface. And when they die, they sink far into the depths and take much of that carbon with them. Alternatively, they are also consumed in the food chain, thereby taking carbon further into the bellies of marine life. In fact, it has been suggested that this entire process puts the ocean's carbon sink capacity to be at least equal to all the world's forests combined.

The bad news though is that the measurements that have long calculated the entire ocean's capacity for this process could be off. More specifically, this pertains to the numbers being used when scientists are estimating dates for reduced carbon emissions. According to the Paris Agreement, carbon emissions need to be cut by 2040. Yet if the numbers on the ocean's carbon capture capacity is as off as the new research suggests, that date could be moved back as early (and urgently) as 2035.

Interestingly, this had less to do with the impacts of climate change and more to do with simply using the wrong math without accounting for a number of other factors that could contribute to the oceanic carbon cycle's absorption from the atmosphere. (For instance, it could have overestimated the rate at which dead phytoplankton could be sinking to the ocean's depths.)

This has prompted researchers to go back to doing closer study of the ocean depths and take measurements to see just which of the alternative predictive models could be more accurate.

Climate change still threatens ocean's cycles

Of course, that is not to say that the ocean's cycles are immune from the real-time effects of global warming. The carbon absorption of its phytoplankton population is still faced with its own share of threats from man-made pollution as well as rising ocean temperatures. Overfishing has also added its own share of problems as entire food chains are disrupted from the sudden absence of keystone species. Thus, it is a race against time for researchers to get new samples for to create new data on how well the seas can help reduce emissions, while new policies must be put in place to ensure that emissions must be cut more drastically than ever.