{"id":90104,"date":"2019-04-29T14:22:58","date_gmt":"2019-04-29T21:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/as-oceans-warm-microbes-could-pump-more-co2-back-into-air-study-warns"},"modified":"2019-04-29T14:22:58","modified_gmt":"2019-04-29T21:22:58","slug":"as-oceans-warm-microbes-could-pump-more-co2-back-into-air-study-warns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/as-oceans-warm-microbes-could-pump-more-co2-back-into-air-study-warns","title":{"rendered":"As oceans warm, microbes could pump more CO2 back into air, study warns"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/as-oceans-warm-microbes-could-pump-more-co2-back-into-air-study-warns.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The world\u2019s oceans soak up about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans pump into the air each year\u2014a powerful brake on the greenhouse effect. In addition to purely physical and chemical processes, a large part of this is taken up by photosynthetic plankton as they incorporate carbon into their bodies. When plankton die, they sink, taking the carbon with them. Some part of this organic rain will end up locked into the deep ocean, insulated from the atmosphere for centuries or more. But what the ocean takes, the ocean also gives back. Before many of the remains get very far, they are consumed by aerobic bacteria. And, just like us, those bacteria respire by taking in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide. Much of that regenerated CO2 thus ends up back in the air.<\/p>\n<p>A new study suggests that CO2 regeneration may become faster in many regions of the world as the oceans warm with changing climate. This, in turn, may reduce the deep oceans\u2019 ability to keep <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/carbon\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">carbon<\/a> locked up. The study shows that in many cases, bacteria are consuming more plankton at shallower depths than previously believed, and that the conditions under which they do this will spread as water temperatures rise. The study was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe results are telling us that warming will cause faster recycling of carbon in many areas, and that means less carbon will reach the <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/deep+ocean\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">deep ocean<\/a> and get stored there,\u201d said study coauthor Robert Anderson, an oceanographer at Columbia University\u2019s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2019-04-oceans-microbes-co2-air.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><\/p>\n<div style=\"clear:both;\">Read more<\/div>\n<p><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The world\u2019s oceans soak up about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans pump into the air each year\u2014a powerful brake on the greenhouse effect. In addition to purely physical and chemical processes, a large part of this is taken up by photosynthetic plankton as they incorporate carbon into their bodies. When plankton die, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,493,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-climatology","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}