Southern Ocean removing carbon dioxide from atmosphere more efficiently

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://news.agu.org/press-release/southern-ocean-removing-carbon-dioxide-from-atmosphere-more-efficiently/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Southern Ocean removing carbon dioxide from atmosphere more efficiently[/font]

[font size=4]Scientists compile densest carbon data set in Antarctic waters[/font]

10 September 2015
Joint Release

[font size=3]WASHINGTON, D.C. – Since 2002, the Southern Ocean has been removing more of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to two new studies.

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The global oceans are an important sink for human-released carbon dioxide, absorbing nearly a quarter of the total carbon dioxide emissions every year. Of all ocean regions, the Southern Ocean below the 35th parallel south plays a particularly vital role. “Although it comprises only 26 percent of the total ocean area, the Southern Ocean has absorbed nearly 40 percent of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide taken up by the global oceans up to the present,” says David Munro, a scientist at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado Boulder, and an author on the GRL paper.

The GRL paper focuses on one region of the Southern Ocean extending from the tip of South America to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula (see Figure 1). “The Drake Passage is the windiest, roughest part of the Southern Ocean,” says Colm Sweeney, lead investigator on the Drake Passage study, co-author on both the GRL and Science papers, and a CIRES scientist working in the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. “The critical element to this study is that we were able to sustain measurements in this harsh environment as long as we have—both in the summer and the winter, in every year over the last 13 years. This data set of ocean carbon measurements is the densest ongoing time series in the Southern Ocean.”

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The Science paper, led by Peter Landschützer at the ETH Zurich, takes a more expansive view of the Southern Ocean. This study uses two innovative methods to analyze a dataset of surface water carbon dioxide spanning almost three decades and covering all of the waters below the 35th parallel south. These data—including Sweeney and Munro’s data from the Drake Passage—also show that the surface water carbon dioxide is increasing slower than atmospheric carbon dioxide, a sign that the Southern Ocean as a whole is more efficiently removing carbon from the atmosphere. These results contrast with previous findings that showed that the Southern Ocean carbon dioxide sink was stagnant or weakening from the early 1990s to the early 2000s.

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[TexasProgresive]

1. Is this a plus

since CO2 dissolved makes it acid.

[Maedhros]

2. The acidity is somewhat buffered by the precipitation of carbonate.[n/t]

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. The reinvigoration of the Southern Ocean carbon sink

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6253/1221.full

[font face=Serif]Science 11 September 2015:
Vol. 349 no. 6253 pp. 1221-1224
DOI: 10.1126/science.aab2620
[font size=5]The reinvigoration of the Southern Ocean carbon sink[/font]

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[font size=4]Abstract[/font]

[font size=3]Several studies have suggested that the carbon sink in the Southern Ocean—the ocean’s strongest region for the uptake of anthropogenic CO₂ —has weakened in recent decades. We demonstrated, on the basis of multidecadal analyses of surface ocean CO₂ observations, that this weakening trend stopped around 2002, and by 2012, the Southern Ocean had regained its expected strength based on the growth of atmospheric CO₂. All three Southern Ocean sectors have contributed to this reinvigoration of the carbon sink, yet differences in the processes between sectors exist, related to a tendency toward a zonally more asymmetric atmospheric circulation. The large decadal variations in the Southern Ocean carbon sink suggest a rather dynamic ocean carbon cycle that varies more in time than previously recognized.

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Our results indicate that Earth’s most important sink for anthropogenic CO₂ (5, 6) is more variable than previously suggested and that it responds quite sensitively to physical climate variability. This also suggests that should current climate trends reverse in the near future, the Southern Ocean might lose its recently regained uptake strength, leading to a faster accumulation of CO₂ in the atmosphere and consequently an acceleration of the rate of global warming.[/font][/font]

[NickB79]

4. Cook the atmosphere, or acidify the ocean

Pick your poison.