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:
It’s approaching neutral, so it would be more neutral, not more acidic, wouldn’t it?
When you have volcanoes spewing what amounts to tons of sulfuric acid and blobs of pure liquid CO2 into the ocean every day, I don’t think changing the atmosphere by a few ppm is going to have a lot of impact overall.
We know less about the surface under the oceans than we know about the surface of the Moon and Mars. We have no idea of the overall scale of undersea volcanism. While the sea must certainly dissolve some atmospheric CO2, I am fairly certain that it also releases CO2 into the atmosphere. We can’t be sure in which direction is the net overall exchange. The oceans might be overall releasing more CO2 to the atmosphere than they are absorbing during periods of increased undersea volcanism.
“crosspatch (15:17:52) :
When you have volcanoes spewing what amounts to tons of sulfuric acid and blobs of pure liquid CO2 into the ocean every day[…]”
From the abstract:
“The site, named Champagne, was found to be discharging two distinct fluids from the same vent field: a 103°C gas-rich hydrothermal fluid and cold (<4°C) droplets composed mainly of liquid CO2"
How apt!
Oh, and I would suggest downloading the paper I linked to above at 15:17:52 as there are some interesting things there, to include pictures of mussel beds crawling with crabs only tens of meters from a vent of pure liquid CO2. It sort of puts the entire scare of “increased ocean acidity will dissolve all of our shellfish” in an entirely different light.
Leon Brozyna (14:53:28) :
And likely to be what’s going to happen for the next cycle of ocean phases.
And no doubt the C02 alarmists will try thier best to link the cooling phase to their models. All they will succeed in doing is earning a pitchfork and torch parade guest-of-honor status.
rbateman (14:07:48) :
In yet another inversion of the truth, the scare about ocean acidification is baseless and wrong.
************************
baseless ha ha, I saw what you did there.
I have an idea brewing. Maybe I should’ve posted this on the wacky geoengineering thread.
First I need to know how much calcium hydroxide you can buy for … errrmmmm …… let’s say a hundred billion dollars ??
Who wants to sequester any carbon? Wouldn´t it be better sequester the prophet and his followers?
philincalifornia (15:50:32) :
First I need to know how much calcium hydroxide you can buy for … errrmmmm …… let’s say a hundred billion dollars ??
…Which it is obtained by calcining lime with carbon or oil, decomposing it from CaCO3 to CaO,….that neutralization would be compensated by the CO2 production BEFORE using it.
Everything about CO2 is simply stupid.
“The funding for this was initially derived from my pocket because nobody believed […]” says Lebrato.
…and yet plenty of $ for nonsense, whether economic, political, “scientific”, or whatever…
Does anyone know anything about the CCD or carbonate compensation depth. If I understand rightly, CaCO3 dissolves into the seawater in the depths of the ocean.
I live in the midwest on top of a lot of limestone. It’s hard not to conclude that through deep geologic time an awful lot of CO2 that was once in the atmosphere now is safely sequestered in limestone waiting to be subducted for later release as volcanic CO2 or gradually weathered away. It seems that there is something very strong at work in the carbon cycle tending to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
philincalifornia (15:50:32) :
Yes, that was intentional. Science would give the current ocean pH, and also let everyone know how far away from neutral that is. It would then go on to show the range of pH from 0 to 14, and the percentage of claimed change to the ocean pH towards neutral. It would never stoop to swapping a change of a base pH of 7.4 to 7.2 (for example) as proof of the oceans becoming acidic.
That dirty deed is the work of half-truthers and propagandists.
Good science would also cite many independent measures of ocean pH over time, and especially seek out measurement outside of it’s associated circle.
It would end with a range of uncertainty.
The AGW polyscience is in the business of selling policy cherries.
Sour policy cherries. Requires a ton of sweetener to swallow.
Blecch.
And if left to its own devices, the atmosphere would continue to lose CO2 until the plants died. So along comes man who actually takes some of that sequestered CO2 and puts it back into the atmosphere to enrich it with the gas that gives plant life an extended period of time to exist. Eventually the CO2 will be gone and there will be nothing we can do about it but in the meantime, digging up some of that CO2 and putting it back into the atmosphere isn’t such a bad idea, really.
Remember that this paper was probably written before the publication of one which is contrary to the final “acidification” speculation. “Oh snap! CO2 causes some ocean critters to build more shells” lists sea urchins among the critters who grow larger when there is more dissolved carbon in the water.
“philincalifornia (15:50:32) :
I have an idea brewing. Maybe I should’ve posted this on the wacky geoengineering thread.
First I need to know how much calcium hydroxide you can buy for … errrmmmm” ……
No phil, you are not going to get up a kalk drip!
crosspatch (15:17:52) says:
They claim it produces only about 0.1% of MOR Carbon fluxes … although they do conclude, if I have read it correctly, that the CO2 comes predominantly from magma degassing.
That suggests that it doesn’t contribute much.
crosspatch (16:21:59) :
If Vulcanism ceases on Earth, eventually all the carbon will be frozen out, and life with it. My understanding of planetary science is that it’s Earth’s level of vulcanism that has kept the carbon-cycle going (and it’s atmospheric component). On Mars, it ceased, and any life on that planet perished along with the liquid water and atmosphere. Venus, being too close to the Sun, has too high a level of vulcanism, and so is polluted out.
This is a warning not to interfere with Earth’s climate through carbon-sequestration. It is both deadly and unnecessary.
The biosphere is fully capable of handing many times the amount of C02 than is now present. It has done so repeatedly in the past.
A dearth of C02 would be more like a mass-extinction event. Only small footprint creatures and plants would be able to survive it.
“They claim it produces only about 0.1% of MOR Carbon fluxes”
And I claim that they have no idea. We have no idea how many undersea volcanoes there are, how often they erupt or even how many are erupting right now. We just happen across them once in a while.
Since we know that 2/3 of the surface is under water, it would seem reasonable to take all known measurements of all known surface volcanoes and multiply by 3 to get some general ballpark. But what if there is MUCH more volcanic activity under water such as at spreading centers? You could have what amounts to thousands of miles of nearly constant activity. We just don’t know.
Here is the thing … an eruption on land of a force that would cause a plume of ash thousands of feet into the air can happen under water and go completely unnoticed because of the pressures involved. You get some sooty water, blobs of CO2 gas, and sulfuric acid. Nobody has any clue as to how much CO2 is being vented into the sea. And there are possibly huge beds of CO2 hydrates just like there are methane hydrates. An earthquake could be enough to destabilize them as would a slight increase in geothermal temperature. Basically these are beds of CO2 frozen in a slush of frozen fresh water.
We measure the amount of CO2 emitted on Hawaii but what about Loihi? Loihi is the next Hawaiian island that is being built South of Hawaii and is still some 1000 meters below the surface of the sea.
Smokey (13:30:17) :
Ocean pH has varied widely in the past: click
The CO2 levels in this graph show the levels to be roughly flat with the pH varying considerably. How de do dat if CO2 is the devil?
Ray Donahe (14:41:31) :
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?
Ray, I will bet no on has taken the time to calculate the amount of CO2 needed to change the volume of the ocean by a pH of 0.1 units.
Oceans are alkaline, freshwater (rivers lakes) are acidic (or less alkaline).
If less alkaline is BAD for shelled critters, how come lots of shelled critters live in freshwater?
Jeff Alberts (15:09:28) :
(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.)
“It’s approaching neutral, so it would be more neutral, not more acidic, wouldn’t it?”
Changes in ph can be considered going from more to less or less to more depending your reference point and how you want to say it. You can say ph 7.2 is more acidic than 8.0 You could also say 7.2 is less alkaline than 8.0 Just because something is more or less than a chosen reference point doesn’t necessarily tell us if it is an acid or not. It all depends on which side of the fence you want to be on and which idea you are trying to push.
I have so much respect for science, I really do. I can only say that the hubris of science in recent years is so very. . . .unscientific. Science used to have a tremendous respect for the idea of how large was the volume of “we don’t know what we don’t know yet”. Somewhere in the last 30 years many scientists have lost that respect. They look back at the last 100 years and are so impressed by the gains we’ve made that they no longer have a proper appreciation for how little that is in the universe of what is yet to be discovered.
It would appear that palaeoceanographer Justin Ries of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill does not know anything about the physiology of living things. Support structures are dependent on stress not enviromental chemistry. All life will compensate for minor or slow changes in nutricianal chemistry.
crosspatch – 16.51.29: {So along comes man who actually takes some of that sequestered CO2 and puts it back into the atmosphere to enrich it with the gas that gives plant life an extended period of time to exist}
Here’s my loopy way of seeing some of this stuff:
Man is within nature, as nothing can be outside of nature, therefore man is natural. Therefore what man does is natural. CO2 could very well disappear as may have happened on Mars. Therefore it is within nature for man to replenish this valuable gas to keep life living. The “trick” is to not allow the atmosphere to get to be “obese” on this CO2!
🙂
I have to guess that “modern” “scientists” must not have played any poker or bridge in their “growing years”. Don’t seem to know about the law of random distributions, or the law of probability. So here is a bit of a clue: It is quite rare to be dealt a royal flush, but it does happen. Variance within a degree Celsius means nothing, but when weather events combine to cause large losses of crops which can’t be harvested (Fall of 2009, US) or huge amounts of snow in winter (which has to melt in spring, adding to spring rain runoff) make for a very late date to plant crops, this winter so far, and the first month of winter still has almost 2 weeks left) widespread famine is always the result.
I’m “jest a country boy”, ejumikated in one of those there little one-room school houses in rural Iowa, by one of them there schoolmarms, so I am gonna grow lots of vegetables. I do like to have enough food to eat at a price I can afford. Good thing I live in Phoenix, lovely weather we are having here.
“Scientists” arguing madly over less than 1 degree Celsius, while Hell is freezing over.
The subject of AGW gives me heartburn, so we could use some more calcium carbonate from those echinoderms anyway for the antacids we all take.