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OCEAN CARBON CYCLE

A canary in the Southern Ocean

Nature Climate Change volume 9, pages 651–652 (2019)Cite this article

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The Southern Ocean is a major carbon sink, but knowledge of its variability is limited, especially in the coastal Antarctic. Now, results based on 25 years of observations in the West Antarctic Peninsula show that the carbon sink is increasing rapidly, driven by summertime biological production linked to sea ice dynamics.

Two centuries ago, when Captain Nathaniel Brown Palmer and his crew sailed around the Antarctic Peninsula, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere was around 280 ppm and the oceans were a net source of CO2 (ref. 1). Since then, anthropogenic CO2 emissions have led to a marked increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, which reached 410 ppm in 2019. Oceans have taken up a quarter of the anthropogenic CO2 (ref. 2), slowing the rate of climate change. Without this ocean carbon sink, atmospheric concentrations would now be almost 500 ppm. However, it is uncertain how the marine CO2 sink will evolve in the future, given the complex coupling between physical, chemical and biological processes not yet well observed or represented in models used to simulate future climate3. To improve the predictions of these models, it is important to obtain long-term, multidisciplinary observations of CO2 dynamics in the Southern Ocean, where both warming and sea-ice changes alter the ocean stratification and the ecosystems that control the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon. Writing in Nature Climate Change, Michael Brown and colleagues4 present such observations and find a strong decline in surface water carbon.

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Fig. 1: Mean dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) concentration observed in surface waters in the West Antarctic Peninsula.

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  • 16 September 2019

    In the version of this News & Views originally published, the ORCID (0000-0002-1165-1074) for author Nicholas Metzl was missing; it has now been added.

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  1. LOCEAN-IPSL (CNRS/SU/IRD/MNHN), Sorbonne Université, Paris, France

    Nicolas Metzl

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Correspondence to Nicolas Metzl.

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Metzl, N. A canary in the Southern Ocean. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 651–652 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0562-1

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