The ocean is a major sink for CO2 and 200,000 pollutant

By: E.F.E

The oceans with more than 3,000 meters deep cover half the planet's surface.
The ocean plays a central role in regulating Earth's climate and is a major sink for CO2 and other substances, with more than 200,000 synthetic pollutants resulting from human activity.

This was stated by the researcher of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (IMEDEA), Carlos Duarte, introducing the media to project Malaspina 2010, the largest issue of history that aims to assess the impact of global change on the ocean.

Global change is defined as the impact of human activity on the functioning of the biosphere.

The program's interdisciplinary project, which collected 70 000 samples of air, water and plankton, also seeks to promote the exploration of biodiversity in the deep ocean.

The oceans with more than 3,000 meters deep cover half the planet's surface and are therefore most ecosystem.

However, the oceans remain a mystery and exploration of life in the deep ocean is still in its infancy, limited, until recently, by the technologies available.

As explained responsible for the CSIC, during the presentation of the project, the Ocean is also the memory of the climate system, and every drop of water that was once on the surface maintains the properties of time, like a fingerprint question by allowing to infer the atmospheric conditions of the time and so know the scope of global change.

The project will launch 50 Ocean buoys continue to record and sending key data to improve knowledge of ocean circulation and heating, as well as calibrate new instruments on board satellites.

On the other hand the importance of studying the phytoplankton is the fact that this is responsible for almost half of the photosynthesis that occurs on the planet, and therefore has a key role in the dynamics of global processes, including those affect climate regulation.

Thanks to elespectador