When Oceans Get Warmer, Carbon Dioxide Uptake By Marine Plankton May Be Reduced

ScienceDaily.com

ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2009) — The global ocean plays a central role in Earth’s climate system and has considerably slowed down climate change by taking up about one third of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted through human activities.

To what extent this will continue in the future depends on a variety of physical and chemical processes - and, as marine scientists from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR) together with colleagues from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (Bremerhaven, Germany) and the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research (Warnemünde, Germany) have now shown in an experiment with natural plankton communities, also depends on biological factors.

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