Massive ocean carbon sink spotted burping CO2 on the sly

Dec. 14, 2018

SOCCOM researchers Seth Bushinsky and Joellen Russell are quoted in this Nature article about Southern Ocean carbon fluxes:

Data from robotic ocean floats reveal that waters off Antarctica don’t absorb as much carbon as scientists thought

Jeff Tollefson, December 14, 2018

The Southern Ocean is one of humanity’s allies, slowing global warming by absorbing heat and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But now researchers report that the choppy waters around Antarctica are also quietly belching out massive quantities of CO2 during the dark and windy winter, reducing the ocean’s climate benefit.

The scientists behind the work, presented this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington DC, say that the winter emissions reduce the Southern Ocean’s net uptake of CO2 by 34%, or more than 1.4 billion tonnes per year. That amount is roughly equal to Japan’s annual carbon emissions.

“The Southern Ocean is still going to be important in the global carbon cycle,” says Seth Bushinsky, an oceanographer at Princeton University in New Jersey who is leading the study. “We’re just trying to understand exactly how and why.”  [read more…]