It is no secret that the pollution in our environment is growing at an exponential rate, and the COVID-19 lockdown has done nothing to tame it.?
Most of the carbon dioxide is either absorbed by the air, in the atmosphere or absorbed by water bodies.
While researchers have been able to quantify emissions around the world. The bifurcation between how much is absorbed by the water versus how much is absorbed by the atmosphere is difficult to measure.
And now, a recent study has revealed that the world's oceans are soaking around 900 million metric tonnes of CO2. Just to put things into perspective, this is equal to ten percent of global fossil fuel emissions.?
This is according to researchers from the University of Exeter. They looked at total CO2 flux (flux meaning movement of greenhouse gases) from the year 1992 to 2018. They discovered that by accounting for the subsurface water, total carbon movement nearly doubled in some regions.
Professor Andrew Watson, of Exeter's Global Systems Institute, explained, “Half of the carbon dioxide we emit doesn't stay in the atmosphere but is taken up by the oceans and land vegetation 'sinks'. Previous studies that have done this have, however, ignored small temperature differences between the surface of the ocean and the depth of a few metres where the measurements are made. Those differences are important because carbon dioxide solubility depends very strongly on temperature.”
He added, “We used satellite data to correct for these temperature differences, and when we do that it makes a big difference - we get a substantially larger flux going into the ocean. The difference in ocean uptake we calculate amounts to about 10 percent of global fossil fuel emissions.”
Even though CO2 in the air is mostly responsible for global warming and thus, less CO2 in the air equals that much better air quality, the damage it does to the oceans is considerable.
Researchers state that CO2 in a marine ecosystem turns water more acidic, which results in catastrophic damage to the already endangered coral reefs, resulting in coral bleaching. This causes creatures in that region to migrate while making them susceptible to danger.?