Much more carbon is sequestered by echinoderms than previously thought.
Published online 7 January 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1041
Animals such as sea stars, sea urchins and sea lilies bury much more carbon than anticipated, according to the first study to estimate echinoderms’ contribution to ocean carbon storage.
Studies of biological carbon in the oceans tend to focus on organisms that drift through the shallows, such as plankton, because they are known to store carbon in the form of calcium carbonate, which they transport to the sea floor when they die.
Mario Lebrato suspected that bottom-dwelling animals such as echinoderms also store large amounts of calcium carbonate, and wondered how large a role they might have in the global carbon cycle.
While still an undergraduate at the University of Southampton, UK, Lebrato, now a PhD student at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Science in Germany, set out to study the rates at which echinoderms absorb calcium carbonate and what happens to the carbon when they die. “The funding for this was initially derived from my pocket because nobody believed in the echinoderm [carbon] contribution,” says Lebrato.
Read the rest of the story here:
At the end of the article: “One key issue that the research raises is the potential effect that ocean acidification resulting from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide might have on echinoderms and their carbon-storage abilities….”
Here we go again. A good paper ruined by AGW nonsense.
Ries and his comments about acidification is wrong. The oceans are still alkali and additional CO2 in the ocean only makes the oceans less alkali. The oceans are not acidic until the ph level of the oceans cross the line between alkali and acidic. More lies being spread by scaremongering scientists.
I see that the obligitory CO2 buildup statement is included at the end. What concerns me is how does the biosphere get the carbon back. Its no wonder we are running out of CO2
The Nature article ends on a politically correct note of ocean acidification, suggestive of pending doom [rather than the more correct picture of the alkaline oceans being neutralized]. Science Daily also has a piece on this study that’s a bit more balanced, suggesting that this is a matter in need of additional study. See:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100108101425.htm
Ocean pH has varied widely in the past: click
Smokey (13:30:17) :
Ocean pH has varied widely in the past: click
Any more information
Richard deSousa (13:21:04) : “Ries and his comments about acidification is wrong. The oceans are still alkali and additional CO2 in the ocean only makes the oceans less alkali. The oceans are not acidic until the ph level of the oceans cross the line between alkali and acidic. ”
This has been discussed here a while ago. What they mean by acidification is not that the oceans are now acid but that they are more acidic then before. If the ph of the ocean was 7.6 and it is now 7.4 it is more acidic but still alkaline.
Technically correct but purposely misleading to the average joe.
Compared with sea and earth dwelling creatures, humans inhabit a flat, two-dimensional environment. Echinoderms, like many other extra-dimensional to us lifeforms, may not know much about the crumbs that fall from our table but they do know what they like!
If they, like plants, can profit from our profligacy then I say. Good luck guys and prosper!
To dismiss them as mere Carbon Sinks is a tad disrespectful to my mind.
Do we think that throwing bread to birds in winter is just a way of getting rid of stale bread?
If the WWF really cares about all carbon-based lifeforms, other than ourselves, then where is the TV advert to adopt an Echinoderm?
For only £3 per month!
Since both sets of Satellite data are up to date, and since we have an El Nino at the end rather than a La Nina, I decided to update the trends for the last 12 years. Here are the results:
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2010/01/twelve-year-satellite-temperature.html
Brian P (13:36:05):
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V12/N26/B1.php
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V12/N22/EDIT.php
“”Echinoderms are found in all ecosystems at all depths worldwide and have bodies that can be composed of more than 80% calcium carbonate … so we were almost expecting a result like this,” says Lebrato.”
You would think that someone studying something, would start out with at least a clue.
Another example of scientists without a clue.
You know, it makes you wonder.
Here we are running around with combustion engines, our medicine is mostly herbs and spices in pretty packages, the only way we can get off this planet is to ignite a bomb in the back of a tube, and almost the entire planet is crisscrossed with wires and pipes…..
….yet we know enough to control the climate.
Here’s a compromise solution (that will be rejected by both sides): Use quotes around the word, to indicate it is being used in a specific or peculiar sense, thus:
Ocean “acidification”
“… to study the rates at which echinoderms absorb calcium carbonate….” Hmm, hey Nature, isn’t it more like “produce” instead of “absorb?”
One interesting place is “Sand Beach” which is either part of Acadia Natl Park or at least near it. The sand is not pulverized granite, at least not completely, but ground shells and thin tubes that I didn’t recognize. (My Swiss Army knife, purchased when I worked on dot matrix printers, had a 10X hand lens.) It turns out they were sea urchin spines.
Without the hand lens, the sand looked and behaved much like normal sand. I filled a film can with it and sent it to my marine biologist sister with no explanation. Her reaction – “Why did Ric send me the Sand Beach sample? I just threw mine out.”
http://www.nps.gov/acad/naturescience/beaches.htm
http://beaches.uptake.com/blog/sand-beach-acadia-national-park-maine.html
If the near-surface-seawater becomes more acidic and the water exchange between surface an deep ocean is slow (as assumed by the IPCC), then wouldn’t a higher acidification of the top water layer build up a chemical pressure that would accelerate the water exchange? This would of course topple all of the carbon cycle assumptions.
If someone wants this idea, examine it in a study and write a paper, run with it.
In yet another inversion of the truth, the scare about ocean acidification is baseless and wrong.
While adding C02 to the oceans makes for a change to the alkalinity, the C02 does not remain as an acid, but is converted to Calcium Carbonate, an alkaline mineral.
Scaremongering say the oceans are yet another threat: Life on Earth says bring it on, and thanks for the extra food, buddy. ~ Burp ~
Leon Brozyna (13:28:55) :
They note “Calcifying organisms incorporate carbon directly from the seawater into their skeletons in the form of inorganic minerals such as calcium carbonate.” Much better than the Nature comment.
We’re doomed I tell ya, doomed!
All this sequestration going on, What’s a carbon based life-form going to do?
DaveE.
Tilo Reber (13:47:57) :
What happens when we get a La Nina comparable to 1998’s El Nino?
In all my perusings on outlier events in Climate Records, whether its precip, temp, tree rings, etc., for every wild event in one direction, there seems to be an eventual counterpart in the opposite direction.
Do you see what I am talking about, or do you see something else?
Hi All, Quick question: Isn’t a 0.1 measurement of ph a rather large step? In other words an increase or decrease of .1 is hugely significant and under present conditions would take a heck of a long time (?) to reach?
Have a heart. Almost the only way to get a fat research grant nowadays is to tie it up with AGW some way. Me, I think it’s pretty creative to manage to link echinoderms to global warming. And that AGW twist at the end is simply the equivalent of the Lenin quote found in most russian books before 1991.
agenda driven science that would never have been “published” without the last two paragraphs.
which include the terms: extrapolate, glossed over, might have, concievable, “in fact, maybe”.
OMG!
It’s OT but this is real sea change – a climate article that’s linked on Drudge. And it didn’t give me indigestion. The climate change we’ve been experiencing the past century is *gasp* normal!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.htm
The Animatrix has already anticipated that solution.. See attached clip after 1:15
“Leon Brozyna (14:53:28) :
OMG!
[…]”
Mojib Latif’s work again, and i think that they have a slight misunderstanding,
from the article:
Prof Latif “has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.”
I don’t think this is correct. AFAIK Latif is a modeler, so he probably has developed a method of MODELING such temperatures. Source data can only come from the Argo fleet, i think.
“Here we go again. A good paper ruined by AGW nonsense.”
I think it might be difficult the get anything published nowadays unless you pay homage to the powers that be. This type of closing remarks are becoming pretty common. It is a bit scary I think.