Zooplankton Saving Us From Global Warming!!

By Paul Homewood

Why do we have to pay the BBC licence fee for this nonsense?

 

 

A tiny, obscure animal often sold as aquarium food has been quietly protecting our planet from global warming by undertaking an epic migration, according to new research.

These “unsung heroes” called zooplankton gorge themselves and grow fat in spring before sinking hundreds of metres into the deep ocean in Antarctica where they burn the fat.

This locks away as much planet-warming carbon as the annual emissions of roughly 55 million petrol cars, stopping it from further warming our atmosphere, according to researchers.

This is much more than scientists expected. But just as researchers uncover this service to our planet, threats to the zooplankton are growing.

If anyone has heard of them, it’s probably as a type of fish food available to buy online.

But their life cycle is odd and fascinating. Take the copepod, a type of zooplankton that is a distant relative of crabs and lobsters.

Just 1-10mm in size, they spend most of their lives asleep between 500m to 2km deep in the ocean.

In pictures taken under a microscope, you can see long sausages of fat inside their bodies, and fat bubbles in their heads, explains Prof Daniel Mayor who photographed them in Antarctica.

Without them, our planet’s atmosphere would be significantly warmer.

Globally the oceans have absorbed 90% of the excess heat humans have created by burning fossil fuels. Of that figure, the Southern Ocean is responsible for about 40%, and a lot of that is down to zooplankton.

Scientists were already aware that the zooplankton contributed to carbon storage in a daily process when the animals carbon-rich waste sinks to the deep ocean.

But what happened when the animals migrate in the Southern Ocean had not been quantified.

The latest research focussed on copepods, as well as other types of zooplankton called krill, and salps.

The creatures eat phytoplankton on the ocean surface which grow by transforming carbon dioxide into living matter through photosynthesis. This turns into fat in the zooplankton.

“Their fat is like a battery pack. When they spend the winter deep in the ocean, they just sit and slowly burn off this fat or carbon,” explains Prof Daniel Mayor at University of Exeter, who was not part of the study.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c628nnz3rp9o

“Protecting us from global warming”? These creatures have been around for millions of years and have always been just a part of the cycle of life on the planet.

They have not suddenly arrived to save us from anything.

But silly Georgina gives the game away when she writes:

The research team calculated that this process  transports 65 million tonnes of carbon annually to at least 500m below the ocean surface.

65 million tonnes is a drop in the ocean – about half a day’s worth of man made emissions.