CleanBeta

The World’s Dying Oceans

Measuring the Ocean’s Metabolism 

This image shows increases and decreases in the amount of carbon consumed by ocean plant life between 1997-2002 and 1979-1986. Blue hues represent a decline in productivity, while orange hues indicate an increase.

Plant life in the world’s oceans absorbs 6% much less carbon from the atmosphere than it did in the 1980s. This has obvious implications for the global carbon cycle. The ocean absorbs far less carbon than it once did because of increased temperatures and decreased iron deposition, which is a crucial nutrient for phytoplankton and comes from trans-continental dust clouds. This image combines two data sets generated from 1979-1986 and 1997-2002, which monitored the estimates of phytoplankton amounts during the relevant time period.