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Oceanography

The dark side of marine carbon

Nature Geoscience volume 2, pages 603–604 (2009)Cite this article

A Correction to this article was published on 01 November 2009

This article has been updated

The fate of sinking particulate organic matter in the world ocean is a key source of uncertainty in the global carbon cycle. Model simulations suggest that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations depend critically on the depths that these particles typically reach.

Processes controlling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have attracted the attention of Earth scientists for generations. The conversion of inorganic carbon to organic carbon through photosynthesis, and its conversion back to inorganic matter through remineralization, exerts a strong control on atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Predicting how climate change will affect these two processes is one of the greatest challenges facing Earth scientists today. In particular, the fate of sinking particulate organic matter in the world ocean is a key source of uncertainty in the global carbon cycle. On page 630 of this issue, Kwon and colleagues use a three-dimensional global ocean biogeochemistry model to assess how remineralization of carbon below the well-lit surface waters of the ocean affects atmospheric CO2 concentrations1.

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Figure 1: The oceanic biological pump.

Change history

  • 27 September 2009

    In the version of this News & Views originally published, the two occurrences of 'dissolved organic carbon' in the penultimate paragraph should have been 'dissolved inorganic carbon'. This has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the text.

References

  1. Kwon, E. Y., Primeau, F. & Sarmiento, J. L. Nature Geosci. 2, 630–635 (2009).

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  2. Volk, T. & Hoffert, M. I. in The Carbon Cycle and Atmospheric CO2: Natural Variations Archean to Present (eds Sundquist, E. T & Broecker, W. S) 99–110 (Geophysical Monograph Series Vol. 32, AGU, 1985).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Raymond Najjar is in the Departments of Meteorology and Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University, 503 Walker Building, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802-5013, USA. najjar@meteo.psu.edu,

    Raymond Najjar

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  1. Raymond Najjar
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Najjar, R. The dark side of marine carbon. Nature Geosci 2, 603–604 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo621

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo621

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