Posted on 03/20/2013 11:35:53 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Hyperia | Credit Wikimedia
Despite the fuss about CO2 emissions, on a global scale no one is quite sure where a lot of it ends up. Those mystery “sinks” draw in a large proportion of CO2. Here’s a big sink that just got twice as big.
Science Daily Mar. 17, 2013 — Models of carbon dioxide in the world’s oceans need to be revised, according to new work by UC Irvine and other scientists published online Sunday in Nature Geoscience. Trillions of plankton near the surface of warm waters are far more carbon-rich than has long been thought, they found. Global marine temperature fluctuations could mean that tiny Prochlorococcus and other microbes digest double the carbon previously calculated.
The trouble started when someone made an assumption.
In making their findings, the researchers have upended a decades-old core principle of marine science known as the Redfield ratio, named for famed oceanographer Alfred Redfield. He concluded in 1934 that from the top of the world’s oceans to their cool, dark depths, both plankton and the materials they excrete contain the same ratio (106:16:1) of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus.
But as any gardener who has done a soil test knows, amounts of those elements can vary widely. The new study’s authors found dramatically different ratios at a variety of marine locations. What matters more than depth, they concluded, is latitude. In particular, the researchers detected far higher levels of carbon in warm, nutrient-starved areas (195:28:1) near the equator than in cold, nutrient-rich polar zones (78:13:1).
“The Redfield concept remains a central tenet in ocean biology and chemistry. However, we clearly show that the nutrient content ratio in plankton is not constant and thus reject this longstanding central theory for ocean science,” said lead author Adam Martiny, associate professor of Earth system science and ecology & evolutionary biology at UC Irvine. “Instead, we show that plankton follow a strong latitudinal pattern.”
A we farming plankton next? Will we get carbon credits?
World Plankton prevalence | Wikimedia
POST NOTE (late addition):
The point here is that there is a $176 billion dollar annual turnover in a market that depends on carbon accounting models which don’t even have the basic big numbers right. Then there is an assumption that human emitted CO2 will raise global CO2 levels. What if our small extra emissions are mostly swallowed up by plankton (and other as yet unknown sinks). What if CO2 levels are controlled by temperature, not by your SUV?
This is about the folly of thinking we know what is going on.
Adam C. Martiny, Chau T. A. Pham, Francois W. Primeau, Jasper A. Vrugt, J. Keith Moore, Simon A. Levin, Michael W. Lomas. Strong latitudinal patterns in the elemental ratios of marine plankton and organic matter. Nature Geoscience, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1757
Image Credit : Wikimedia | Wikipedia: Plankton
We mmust stop this consumption of a valuable resource...these critters are stealing food for all of our land based plants that supply us and our meat based life forms with food.
All Hail Plankton!
Right here in Orange County ....California.
Now if they would just go back to teaching the carbon cycle in schools, and the water cycle, and the..............................
Now, if they could just measure their respiration, excretion, and decomposition products, we might just be getting somewhere.
Well... for once GovernMental action doesn’t suck canal water and squander money!!! Phhhhht!!!
So we have to burn all that dirty oil and coal to “save the whales” . . . baleen whale feeders need the plankton to survive . . . yammering leftists need to understand that their clever arguments are no match for God’s wisdom, and it shows . . . it says as much in the Bible.
Sent that Money to UC Irvine.
Back in the 1980s when I believed that AGW was real, I was proposing stimulating the growth of marine algae with which to feed Foraminifera as the only reasonable way to sequester massive amounts of carbon at reasonable cost.
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Over hundreds of millions of years these tiny creatures have swarmed the ocean bestowing to the planet their exquisite dwellings, a smidgen of which was once fashioned into the Egyptian Pyramids
So they will admit they are full of it on the global warming thing? I bet not.
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Foraminifera form a considerable part of Earth biomass and are in the fossil record
since at least 542.000.000 B.C., but are mainly ignored by the public. With this non-commercial project we want to foster the interest in these precious and basal forms of life. Try the illustrated Taxonomy Guide Online 19th of March 2013: 6415 forams and new: Rügen, Germany, Maastrichtian |
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Neoflabellina reticulata (Reuss, 1851)
Maastrichtian, Cretaceous Rügen, Germany |
Globulina gibba d'Orbigny, 1846
recent Ile de Porquerolles, France |
Elphidium limpidum Ho, Hu et Wang, 1965
recent Bohai Sea, China |
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Free Introduction to Forams
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micropaleontology
- the major journal for scientific papers on fossil and recent foraminifera.  |
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I will NOT Haggle with that.
” - - - The trouble started when someone made an assumption. - - - “
Always test and re-test any and all assumptions.
Headline redactions are me! lol
Somebody ought to make that the basis of a protocol for, oh, I don't know, some kind of discipline of human knowledge or something.
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