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Letter

Nature Geoscience 2, 105–109 (1 February 2009) | doi:10.1038/ngeo420

Long-term ocean oxygen depletion in response to carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels

Gary Shaffer , Steffen Malsk|[aelig]|r Olsen & Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen

Ongoing global warming could persist far into the future, because natural processes require decades to hundreds of thousands of years to remove carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning from the atmosphere. Future warming may have large global impacts including ocean oxygen depletion and associated adverse effects on marine life, such as more frequent mortality events, but long, comprehensive simulations of these impacts are currently not available.