Plankton Hold Surprise for Climate Research

"It's quite significant," said Scott Doney of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass., who was not part of the research. "I think it's going to make a lot of people scramble around to try to figure out if this is a uniform finding in coccoliths."

Iglesias-Rodriguez's results suggest that carbon removal from increased photosynthesis and release from increased calcification will probably roughly cancel each other out. But booming coccolithophore populations could displace other phytoplankton, or coccolithophore predators could be affected by the bigger critters.

The increased calcium carbonate could also affect how much coccolithophore mass falls to the ocean floor, another carbon sink.

"Nobody's thought through these new effects," Doney said.

"At the moment, with the information we have, it's just not possible to say what this means in terms of carbon," Iglesias-Rodriguez agreed. "But it's very important information for the models, because they are using the opposite information to what we find."

Doney agreed. "A lot of conclusions have been drawn from a handful of studies, and the ocean has a lot of surprises for us."

Related Links:

Larry O'Hanlon's blog: Earth Impacts

NASA: Coccolithophores

Ocean Acidification

Planet Green

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