Mar 12, 2021 07:32 PM
https://www.inverse.com/science/ocean-tw...ange-study
EXCERPTS: . . . It’s a real place — but under the sea. The mesopelagic zone, also known as the ‘twilight zone,’ is a mysterious region of the ocean between 200 and 1,000 meters in depth. It’s sandwiched between the sunlit surface zone and pitch dark deep ocean. A new study shines a light on its formation over geologic time scales, revealing the process is intimately linked with global temperature.
Currently, this is a boon to the creatures that live there. But, as anthropogenic climate change heats up the ocean, this finding suggests the twilight zone and its integral role in the carbon cycle may be negatively affected. This is bad news not just for the animals that live there, but for people too — a twilight zone in balance is essential for keeping billions of tons of carbon out of our planet’s atmosphere.
This finding was published Thursday in the journal Science. Ultimately, the study suggests that as global temperatures cooled over the past 15 million years, the biological carbon pump, which transfers carbon in the form of organic matter from the surface to the deep ocean, became more efficient.
More organic matter sinking to greater depths means more food to support life below the surface. “We show that this, in turn, represented an evolutionary boost for life in the twilight zone, which became more abundant and diverse in step with global cooling,” co-lead author Flavia Boscolo-Galazzo, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen in Norway, tells Inverse.
The twilight zone is a critical component of a complex process that removes carbon from the atmosphere called the biological carbon pump. [...] All told, the biological carbon pump stores anywhere between 2 and 6 billion metric tons of carbon each year, which prevents the Earth from being 6 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit warmer.
[...] The carbon cycle of the ocean is critical to humanity because it controls the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is also critical to ocean life and fisheries. ... If the existence of the twilight zone as we know it is closely tied with temperature, it could be severely impacted by warming temperatures... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: . . . It’s a real place — but under the sea. The mesopelagic zone, also known as the ‘twilight zone,’ is a mysterious region of the ocean between 200 and 1,000 meters in depth. It’s sandwiched between the sunlit surface zone and pitch dark deep ocean. A new study shines a light on its formation over geologic time scales, revealing the process is intimately linked with global temperature.
Currently, this is a boon to the creatures that live there. But, as anthropogenic climate change heats up the ocean, this finding suggests the twilight zone and its integral role in the carbon cycle may be negatively affected. This is bad news not just for the animals that live there, but for people too — a twilight zone in balance is essential for keeping billions of tons of carbon out of our planet’s atmosphere.
This finding was published Thursday in the journal Science. Ultimately, the study suggests that as global temperatures cooled over the past 15 million years, the biological carbon pump, which transfers carbon in the form of organic matter from the surface to the deep ocean, became more efficient.
More organic matter sinking to greater depths means more food to support life below the surface. “We show that this, in turn, represented an evolutionary boost for life in the twilight zone, which became more abundant and diverse in step with global cooling,” co-lead author Flavia Boscolo-Galazzo, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen in Norway, tells Inverse.
The twilight zone is a critical component of a complex process that removes carbon from the atmosphere called the biological carbon pump. [...] All told, the biological carbon pump stores anywhere between 2 and 6 billion metric tons of carbon each year, which prevents the Earth from being 6 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit warmer.
[...] The carbon cycle of the ocean is critical to humanity because it controls the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is also critical to ocean life and fisheries. ... If the existence of the twilight zone as we know it is closely tied with temperature, it could be severely impacted by warming temperatures... (MORE - details)