Plankton will store more carbon as Earth’s climate warms, but ‘Twilight Zone’ uncertainties remain say researchers

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CO2 is not pollution
The researchers are not going overboard with positivity, but seem clear that the Earth’s carbon cycle is still working much as expected. Unsurprisingly perhaps, they theorise problems might occur by 2100 if some presently unknown limit is approached, but say ‘the Twilight Zone region of the ocean’ needs more research. In short, so far so good.
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The amount of carbon stored by microscopic plankton will increase in the coming century, predict researchers at the University of Bristol and the National Oceanography Centre (NOC).

Using the latest IPCC models (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the team expects the “biological pump”—a process where microscopic plants, often called phytoplankton, take up carbon and then die and sink into the deep ocean where carbon is stored for hundreds of years—to account for between 5 and 17% of the total increase in carbon uptake by the oceans by…

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