(credit: Patrick Rowe, NSF)
The natural movement of carbon through the Earth and its inhabitants is essential to life as we know it. Carbon is needed in our atmosphere for photosynthesis, it’s present in plants and our bodies, and it’s expelled back into the atmosphere by our respiration.
The world’s ocean represents a significant sink in the global carbon cycle, containing the majority of the world’s CO2 in a dissolved form. Dissolved CO2 is required for many chemical and biochemical processes critical for marine organisms. For example, the sunlit level of the ocean is filled with phytoplankton, an organism that uses sunlight and dissolved carbon dioxide to create sugars via photosynthesis.
Iron is a trace nutrient that is critical for photosynthesis. The Southern Ocean has low concentrations of dissolved iron compared to other oceans, leading to lower levels of carbon sequestration—approximately 10 percent of the global sequestration. However, scientists think that sources of iron can lead to elevated localized levels, which could dramatically increase carbon sequestration. The impact of these local changes on the overall carbon sequestration of the Southern Ocean is not well understood.
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